Hey Everyone,
Gijs here from Lavender.Five - a web3 infrastructure company and validator securing funds on many Cosmos and Non-cosmos networks for over 60.000 delegators.
We are currently active on the dYdX testnet under: Interchain Explorer by Cosmostation
Entity name and location
Lavender.Five LLC also known as Lavender.Five nodes is a US based company with employees in the US and the Netherlands.
Infrastructure location
We host infrastructure on our dedicated servers on 4 continents across many different countries and regions including Scandinavia, Germany/Netherlands, East coast US, West coast US, Latin America and South east Asia. Our validators are never located in a single region due to the usage of Horcrux remote signers in a 3/2 setup.
What kind of hardware do you run? Baremetal, cloud-based…? In what geographic regions?
We run our Tendermint validators on Baremetal servers in data centers like OVH, Leaseweb, PhoenixNap, MEVSpace and many more. Our Validator signing key is split over 3 different providers in 3 different geographical regions (2 continents) using the Horcrux remote signer. This validator points to a minimum of 2 Sentry nodes both located with different hosts and in different geographical regions as well. This means 2 Nodes or 2 Signers need to go down before we start significantly missing blocks.
Technical make-up of team (elaborate on no. of dev ops engineers, experience, etc.)
We are a small team of 3 although sometimes we are joking to have a 4th team member called Ansible, our node setup/upgrade automation tool 
- Dylan - Founder, Software developer and DevOps engineer
- James - DevOps engineer
- Gijs - Account manager and Software developer
Years of experience
- Lavender.Five is running Mainnet blockchain validators since the early months of 2021 but has a combined 30+ years of experience in running high uptime systems and backend engineering.
What other networks are you running validators for?
- Lavender.Five runs validators for over 45 networks including Aptos, Near, Cosmos Hub, Injective, Osmosis, Sei and many more.
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?
- Most important is to get validator communication and Genesis setup correct. With having done over 20 Genesis ceremonies and leading 3 we have already contributed a lot of feedback to the wider dYdX community and the dYdX foundation. We will continue to help the network and other operators with the ins and outs of running a tendermint validator, price feeder and additional resources.
Do you have a validator voting framework and process?
- Yes, we monitor proposals on all chains using a bot feeded into our private discord. From there we can vote on the proposals directly. for contentious proposals we leave our feedback on the respective forums and mainly twitter. Our delegator community can always reach us in our Discord, Telegram or Dm. We are open to hearing community feedback as we try to make the decisions that are best for the underlying network.
Are you planning to play any additional roles in the dYdX ecosystem (e.g. market maker, trader, indexer, front-end, other)?
- We will operate a dashboard for the dYdX mainnet with additional metrics, live podcasts and written + video content on our new website launching end of this month.
Are there other products or services you want to highlight that could be relevant for dYdX?
- We will run:
public RPC, API and gRPC endpoints
Seed node
public Addressbook and State snapshot.
IBC relaying
all other operators for dYdX can also use the tooling we create and mantain as listed on our github. Our Ansible playbooks for Horcrux, Relaying, Secure Server setup and Cosmos nodes are amongst the most used automation tools in the cosmos ecosystem : Lavender.Five Nodes · GitHub
Any notable contributions in other ecosystems that you would like to highlight for the community?
- Lavender.Five is known for their longstanding contribution to IBC by relaying thousands of packets every month for over 2 years. We think the biggest value we can provide to dYdX is with our redundant high uptime infrastructure, 24/7 on-call expertise for the various teams, our open source tooling anf contributions and our IBC infrastructure to expand the dYdX ecosystem to as many users as possible.
Big congratulations to everyone on the v4 Governance vote, we hope to be a contributor the this amazing product for many years to come 