Hello! I’m Greg, co-founder of Le Journal du Coin, biggest French speaking Web3 media. As part of our application to become validators for testnet allow me to provide you with a brief introduction about our team.
Entity name and location
Journal du Coin - France
Infrastructure location - What kind of hardware do you run? Baremetal, cloud-based…? In what geographic regions?
For reliability and performance, we have opted for Bare Metal servers from OVH, Hetzner, and Digital Ocean. The functional server infrastructure is hosted at two locations, one in Beauharnois, Canada, and the other in Falkenstein, Germany.
We have also implemented several distributed backups worldwide.
Technical make-up of team (elaborate on no. of dev ops engineers, experience, etc.)
From a technical standpoint, our team includes two full-time DevOps veterans from the crypto ecosystem, spreaded across different time zones (NA + EU) to remain available and responsive 24/7. In addition, we are 20 contributors to the media.
Years of experience
We’re operating the media since 2017, and operating nodes since 2019.
What other networks are you running validators for?
Our goal is to establish a transversal editorial model, funded by delegation revenues obtained from trusted partners who know and believe in us. Some partners, including Layer 1 Avalanche, Near, and Tezos, are already in the process of finalizing this innovative type of partnership.
We also actively operated validator nodes for networks like Mina, Celestia, Stride, and Kyve Network (in testnet and mainnet) during past years in order to gain valuable experience of node operations.
We’re planning to onboard other L1 and protocols, for example Petale’s Vortex (tokenization with institutionnal investors).
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?
Our past experiences as validator and node operators on different configurations and technical backgrounds led us to highlight the importance of collaboration with other validators and their feedback.
We also learned about the importance of the rigorous testing of state sync, snapshots, and pruning of nodes, between testnet and mainnet instances. Finally, as a media player, we’re really concerned about regularly checking for security vulnerabilities and total transparency about it.
Do you have a validator voting framework and process?
We have an internal alerting bot set for notifications of new proposals from our community and internal devs too, and we’re also following new tools allowing us to follow on our voting, as of Wintermute’s delegate tool for gouvernance (WinterGov).
We also plan to engage our French community with podcasts and lives in order to discuss critical governance points if needed.
Are you planning to play any additional roles in the dYdX ecosystem (e.g. market maker, trader, indexer, front-end, other)?
As the world’s first French-language crypto media, we attract over a million monthly readers on our main website, even during the lowest points of the bear market. The platform has a diverse range of outlets, including popular YouTube, Twitch, Tiktok, and Instagram channels. We also boast social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers.
So we plan to offer more than just validation services : we will offer a full media coverage to dYdX ecosystem and help the dYdX brand to reach a full range of users and also tech-savvy and dev profiles.
Are there other products or services you want to highlight that could be relevant for dYdX?
Ultimately, we can offer a full editorial coverage to dYdX in order to reach the French speaking community, with production and publication of articles, tutorials, technical state of articles about the full ecosystem, videos, social networks contents, podcasts.
The idea is to plan your strategy in direct collaboration with your team, freeing you from this burden, and to engage our large and loyal community to become a pillar of your ecosystem.
We will also create a new type of formats and publish abundant literature spontaneously, with a stronger focus on Tech & Data.
Any notable contributions in other ecosystems that you would like to highlight for the community?
As mentioned, we have the largest French-speaking crypto community in the world, and this community will also play a role in this new model.
Furthermore, we position ourselves as a point of convergence between dispersed major crypto players and traditional institutions, enabling Web3 actors to find connections in the Web2 sphere.