Hello, Kristaps here founder of kjnodes!
We are trusted Proof of Stake validator across Cosmos universe. Active ecosystem contributor, IBC relayer and chain service provider since 2021. We deliver top-notch secure and reliable infrastructure for Cosmos projects. 24/7 monitoring with no slashing history in our track record.
Entity Information and location
kjnodes, Latvia
Infrastructure location
Central Europe
What kind of hardware do you run? Baremetal, cloud-based…? In what geographic regions?
We run bare-metal servers located in Central Europe.
Technical make-up of team (elaborate on no. of dev ops engineers, experience, etc.)
Team of 2 DevOps engineers, with focus on problem management - self-healing highly available systems. Worked professionally as SRE/DevOps Engineer at Cloud service provider for more than 5 years. Validating Cosmos chains since 2021.
Years of experience
5+ years of experience in DevOps engineering and more than 3 years experience in running nodes for various crypto projects.
What other networks are you running validators for?
Currently we secure 30 Cosmos mainnet chains and provide our chain services to more than 60 networks. You can find our portfolio at https://kjnodes.com
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?
- Team has to provide dedicated communication channel for validators discussions and coordination. There should be clear timeline for launch phase and upcoming upgrades (time that suits most of the validators in different time zones). Genesis should be published at least 24h before the chain launch so validators can prepare and deploy infrastructure. If there is custom configurations needed it has to be well documented and communicated.
- Validator responsibility is to maintain liveness of their nodes. Have proper monitoring in place to be aware of health status changes and be able to react to the incidents quickly. Validator should use best practices to secure key material and ensure to protect their validator from double signing.
Do you have a validator voting framework and process?
Proposals are reviewed and discussions are held internally. After that, decision is made. We have governance proposal monitoring in place that helps to not miss new chain proposals.
Are you planning to play any additional roles in the dYdX ecosystem (e.g. market maker, trader, indexer, front-end, other)?
Decentralized trading is what we are interested. Especially if it is on Cosmos as it is our main focus.
Are there other products or services you want to highlight that could be relevant for dYdX?
Chain services
Discover daily snapshots, state sync, peering services, public endpoints and much more at Dydx | kjnodes Chain Services
Archive nodes
We offer highly available, load-balanced RPC archive nodes that are strategically distributed across two separate datacenters situated in distinct geographies. This setup allows us to periodically stop one of the nodes to perform node data backup and upload it to the snapshot server without disrupting the services. In addition it provides us tolerance against failures where one node or datacenter goes down. It gives us a way to do maintenance tasks one node at a time, ensuring continued operations. Snapshot server also keeps multiple archive data backups in case there is a need to rollback to earlier block.
RPC Scanner
We collect the list of publicly exposed ones and display it in a nice way on our RPC Scanner dashboard! 
What benefits do you get by using this tool:
- Endpoints are usually not rate limited
- Find additional Archive nodes
- We serve API for integrations
- Discover potential validators who expose the RPC port to the public
Check it out - Public RPC | kjnodes Chain Services
Validator Slashboard
We deliver tool designed to showcase the historical data of validator slashing incidents.
Discover your validator:knife: performance at Slashboard | kjnodes Chain Services
Telegram Governance Bot
Subscribe and get notified when new proposal appears chain. Support for more than 20 networks including dYdX
Learn more at Dydx | kjnodes Chain Services
Any notable contributions in other ecosystems that you would like to highlight for the community?
IBC Relayer
We are running IBC relayer service doing more than 10k transactions per month between chains we are operating in as validators.
Testnet Lead
We took our initiative and applied for testnet lead position in Agoric where we coordinate and exercise upgrade before it goes live on mainnet. Here is forum post.
What have we built so far
- Discord governance bot that helps streamline governance processes and foster better community engagement.
- Telegram governance bot to keep validators notified when there is a new proposal on the chain that is widely used in community.
- Price feeder alert bot to keep validators notified when there is change in Oracle Price Feeder status.
- Monitoring and alerting solution for Cosmos validators
All our services and contributions to the Cosmos ecosystem can be found at https://services.kjnodes.com