Greetings!
Here is a brief overview of our team, activities and projects.
Entity name and location
High Stakes Switzerland, a registered company operating from Geneva.
Infrastructure location
A combination of VPS and baremetal servers, located in Europe. We use OVH, Leaseweb, Digital Ocean, Hetzner (only for non crucial nodes due to their policy), and a couple other providers.
Technical make-up of team
We are 3 “main” members, and a few external contributors assist us occasionnally on topics such as marketing, development or administration.
Years of experience
We’ve been involved in crypto since 2017 and started validating in 2019.
We gradually got more involved in the ecosystem and eventually decided to make it our primary activity, which resulted in the registration of the company in February 2021.
What other networks are you running validators for?
We validate about 15 mainnets, and participate in multiple testnets like Lava and OKP4.
Among the main chains that we are involved in are Injective, Band Protocol, Terra2, Persistence, Provenance, Fetch.ai, Umee…
Our philosophy is to try and participate only to projects in which we believe – we avoid the memechains or those that we do not feel can bring a real added value to the ecosystem.
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?
In most cases, mainnet issues were related to not being sufficiently thorough when experimenting with the testnet. For example, realizing after an upgrade that pruning no longer works, or that the wasm cache should be cleared to avoid a crash, or that all validators should use the same go version for building.
While issues inevitably happen given the complexity of our industry, what matters is how they are resolved. This implies in particular a strong coordination between the validators and a tight-knit community of skilled teams that are willing to collaborate and assist each other with their specific expertise.
Scheduling a time for the upgrades where most validators can be online is also helpful.
Do you have a validator voting framework and process?
We have a bot that alerts us when new proposals go live.
We also monitor the Discord channels and the forums where governance ideas are discussed, so that we can take an appropriate decision – many proposals are no-brainers, but in some cases it can take a lot of thought to make up our minds.
Are you planning to play any additional roles in the dYdX ecosystem?
We absolutely will – probably in the infrastructure and communication/knowledge sharing fields.
Any notable contributions in other ecosystems that you would like to highlight for the community?
While our contributions are limited by the size of our team, we endeavour to bring as much value to the ecosystem as we can: running IBC relayers, generating daily quicksync snapshots, writing articles and tutorials…Typically, we do not just run a node and we always try to bring something else to the table.