Validator Introduction - Nodeinfra

Validators
1

We’re excited to introduce ourselves to the dYdX community! :slight_smile:

  • Entity name and location
    Nodeinfra, South Korea

  • Infrastructure location
    We’re currently running our infrastructure in Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Netherlands, London, and North America.

  • What kind of hardware do you run? Baremetal, cloud-based…? In what geographic regions?
    We use both cloud(AWS/GCP) and baremetal(OVH, PhoenixNap, Vultr, Latitude). We can cover all of the regions mentioned above and also all of the regions supported by the cloud and baremetal providers we’re working with.

  • Technical make-up of team (elaborate on no. of dev ops engineers, experience, etc.)
    Our team consists of the CEO, 1 blockchain researcher, 6 DevOps developers, and 1 designer. Our CEO, John Youngseok Yang, found 2 Ethereum consensus bugs and is ranked #7 in Ethereum Bug Bounty Program. John also has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and published papers in top conferences(dblp: Youngseok Yang). Our engineers studied computer science in prestigious universities in Asia and have extensive knowledge in DevOps and backend development.

  • Years of experience
    We’ve been running nodes since 2022 when Aptos Incentivized Testnet 2 began. Our company was incorporated in 2021 and initially built an NFT marketplace in Korea until we pivoted to providing infrastructure services in 2022.

  • What other networks are you running validators for?
    We’re a genesis validator for Aptos and Sui. We also validate Havah(HVH). One of the largest staking pools in Aptos ($150M+) is being staked with us.

  • 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?
    Clear communication between the foundation and the validators is most important for the success of testnets/mainnets.

  • Do you have a validator voting framework and process?
    Yes, we take a structured approach to voting.
    (1) The CEO and the blockchain researcher first review the proposal internally.
    (2) If the two disagree, other team members provide feedback and the CEO makes the final decision.
    (3) We then collect opinions from the community through forums, SNS and meetings, and do another round of internal decision making.
    (4) We vote.

  • Are you planning to play any additional roles in the dYdX ecosystem (e.g. market maker, trader, indexer, front-end, other)?
    Yes, we’d like to work on the indexer.
    We can provide low-cost, reliable, and low-latency indexer APIs by running indexers on baremetal instances around the world using our DevOps, monitoring, and API management tools. We have extensive experience in running indexers for Move(Aptos/Sui) DApps.
    The dYdX indexer is super interesting to us as it requires low-latency access for trading and handles not only on-chain data but also off-chain data. We would love to test, run, and optimize the indexer for the dYdX ecosystem. We would like to build a business model around the indexer if it makes sense.

  • Are there other products or services you want to highlight that could be relevant for dYdX?
    We’d like to highlight our API service (https://docs.nodeinfra.com) for Aptos/Sui DApps. We work closely with the foundations to test and optimize the Aptos/Sui indexer.

  • Any notable contributions in other ecosystems that you would like to highlight for the community?
    Leveraging our geographical location in Korea, we help foundations to connect and work with companies in Korea. We also have close connections with the computer science research community and schools in Korea, which we leverage to help foundations with their education and research needs.