GM to the entire dYdX team and community, greetings from Enigma !
Allow us to introduce ourselves as a French professional Cosmos ecosystem validator and among dYdX validators. We were genesis validator on dYdX chain and we support the chain with our several services.
Here is our introduction presented in the standardized format.
- Entity name and location
Enigma Validator - We’re located in France
- Infrastructure location
France, North America and for dYdX we run our validator node in Tokyo, Japan
- What kind of hardware do you run? Baremetal, cloud-based…? In what geographic regions?
We run Baremetal and Cloud based infrastrucure , provider across Europe - US and Asia
- Technical make-up of team (elaborate on no. of dev ops engineers, experience, etc.)
Our Team is composed of :
4 Devops - Data engineers with more than 6 years of experiences.
Our team is made up of a group of highly proficient individuals, consisting of four dedicated DevOps and data engineers. Each member have more than six years of experience in their respective fields.
We are in blockchain area since more than 3 years.
- What other networks are you running validators for?
We are currently running validator for over 35 Cosmos chains, such as Cosmos Hub, Axelar, Terra2 , Sei, Stride, Kujira,… More info can be found on our website : Enigma
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Based on your participation in any previous testnets, mainnets, are there any best practices to be aware of? What are some things that made previous testnets, mainnet launches successful and/or things to avoid that have gone poorly?
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Establish a robust validator set consisting of approximately 20/40 validators, striking a balance between size and coordination for optimal network performance.
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Facilitate effective communication by creating dedicated discussion servers/channels exclusively for validators, leveraging platforms like Slack to foster seamless collaboration.
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Organize regular weekly meetings to discuss new implementations and best practices, ensuring continuous improvement and knowledge sharing among validators.
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Strategically schedule upgrades well in advance to accommodate the preferences of at least 67% of the voting power, streamlining the upgrade process and minimizing disruptions.
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Implement real-time chain monitoring using tools like Grafana to gain valuable insights, enabling swift actions in response to network performance data.
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Ensure the monitoring of validators to maintain a healthy network and promptly address any potential issues that may arise.
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Proactively monitor IBC clients to eliminate the need for governance proposals to unfreez or create new ones. We offer a comprehensive monitoring tool for this purpose.
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Provide explorers that offer valuable insights into the network, enhancing transparency and facilitating a deeper understanding of its operations.
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Offer public RPC, gRPC, API, State Sync, and Snapshot providers to grant easy access to essential services, contributing to a seamless user experience. These providers are available through our services.
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Enforce the importance of comprehensive documentation among validators to aid users in understanding network functionalities effectively. We offer documentation services for validators as well. Documentation
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Encourage validators to actively engage with their communities by sharing news, updates, and insights, fostering open communication channels and community involvement.
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If required, we are fully equipped to provide faucet services, offering user-friendly access to the network.
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In terms of communication, being ambiguous about a potential airdrop does more harm than good. It attracts a large number of sybil accounts, destabilizes the network, and even sometimes drains the faucets. This situation has the potential to ruin the UX for legitimate users.
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Do you have a validator voting framework and process?
Regarding participation, we have implemented a dedicated monitoring governance bot on our Corporate Discord to ensure that no proposals are overlooked or missed.
Furthermore, we have adopted an approach for dividing our votes into two distinct categories. First, we handle usual or common routine votes by casting our votes without publicly commenting. This approach allows us to efficiently and effectively contribute to the decision-making process.
Secondly, for significant or contentious votes, we actively engage with the community. We take the time to share our vision, actively participate in forum discussions, and strive to elevate our position and maybe elevate our concerns directly with the proposer.
- Are you planning to play any additional roles in the dYdX ecosystem (e.g. market maker, trader, indexer, front-end, other)?
We are aware that Imperator.co has already been granted by the DAO to build the indexer. However if help is needed, or in the need to decentralized by building a second one we could join the process, we have expertise in developing indexers/analytics, we provide the indexer and analytics for WhiteWhale Money (https://info.whitewhale.money/) and in the past for JunoSwap https://info.junoswap.com/ We are also available to work closely with dedicated trading platforms and institutions to provide these data for them.
- Are there other products or services you want to highlight that could be relevant for dYdX?
In addition to essential services like Relayers, RPC, LCD, snapshot, and comprehensive documentation, we provide specialized IBC channel monitoring bots. These bots ensure continuous channel functionality, preventing relaying issue and maintaining optimal relayer wallet fulfillment.
Moreover, we propose our data analytics capabilities to serve as a reliable API data source for platforms like Coingecko & other.
- Any notable contributions in other ecosystems that you would like to highlight for the community?
We maintain effective communication through weekly newsletters and educational articles on https://enigmavalidator.substack.com/ and through our social networks.