We are excited to introduce ourselves as Node Guardians for the upcoming dYdX v4 testnet!
We are Node Guardians, a group of gamers & engineers passionately dedicated to gamifying the developer experience. Our mission is to transform the process of learning and building into an engaging and rewarding RPG that’s as permisionless as possible.
Our infrastructure is distributed globally with multiple clusters (backups), ensuring a fault-tolerant setup. We employ both Bare Metal (OVH - Vultr - Hetzner) and cloud-based servers (GCP - AWS), strategically located in Europe (France - UK - Germany), North America (Canada), and Asia (Japan) to maintain optimal performance and reliability.
Threshold remote signing (Horcrux) - Monitoring with Grafana + Prometeus
Our team consists of 11 members, with a backbone of 4 experienced devops engineers. Our devops team is distributed geographically to ensure maximal availability (EU & South America)
We bring with us 2 years of hands-on experience, securing over $60M across several networks such as Sui Network, Cosmos Hub, Osmosis, Axelar, Ethereum, Avalanche, KYVE, deBridge, and Namada. We also maintain testnet validators in parallel to our mainnet ones to further support networks when testing out new features before reaching production (Axelar - Kyve - Celestia & more)
Lessons from Previous Networks:
Being involved with various testnets and mainnets has really hammered home how important transparency and communication are. We’ve seen that it’s key for the team operating the testnet to be on the ball with any technical issues and to carefully monitor & acknowledge contributions by different validators
Also, we’ve noticed that a company needs to be super transparent after incidents occur. Swift, detailed breakdowns, or “post-mortems”, are essential. It’s all about building and keeping trust, and making sure everyone learns from any mishaps. This kind of transparency from the entity running the testnet makes for a healthier network.
Validator Voting Framework and Process:
We take governance seriously. Each decision is thoughtfully considered and vetted within our team. We believe in transparency, so we share the reasoning behind our decisions on critical governance proposals on social platforms (Twitter - Youtube). We also host governance gatherings each trimester with our delegators and other ecosystem participants, fostering debate with the community but also discussing best validator practices. These streams are hosted on Journal du Coin’s Youtube channel, France’s leading media dealing with crypto usually viewed between 10 to 20k times
Additional Roles in the dYdX Ecosystem:
As Node Guardians, we offer more than just validation services. We’re known for our lore-rich programming challenges that caters to seasoned developers. We are open to eventually developing more for the dYdX dev community. We can also contribute by providing API, GRPC, snapshots, relayers and deployment charts, community events (meetups/podcasts).
Contributions to Other Ecosystems:
We are proud of our various contributions to PoS chains, which include organizing hackathons CTF, technical conferences, and dozens of explainers, technical and non-technical podcasts. We’ve also written numerous articles for France’s largest publication, providing a wealth of knowledge and insight to our readers.
We look forward to potentially supporting DyDx v4 as validators!
Happy to answer any questions the DyDx community might have 
We would have loved to provide more references / links but our account is quite new so we’re limited to 2