Hello everyone!
My name is Luka and i am the CEO of P-OPS Team. We are a group of 8 highly qualified technology enthusiasts, located across the globe. We are a decentralized organization, passionate about Web 3.0, distributed ledger technology (DLT) and decentralization.
With a combined 40+ years of experience in blockchain, P-OPS Team has come to light in early 2019 as a community initiative around Harmony protocol. Since then, we have become an extended team of Harmony whilst expanding our services to other networks and projects. We are specialized in running validators for several networks, while also providing consultation, growth acceleration and funding to new and innovative Web 3.0 projects.
Our entity is located in Slovenia, and we solely use baremetal servers for running our validators. Our locations are mostly Netherlands (Amsterdam, Naaldwijk), Lithuania, and some in Germany and USA (mostly Chicago). Our team is currently comprised of 8 individuals, out of which we have 5 devops engineers and 2 developers. All devops engineers have extensive backgrounds working in either traditional or blockchain companies focusing on infrastructure. We are an AAA rated StakingRewards verified provider with over 100M $ in AUM (staked assets).
We currently support 18 mainnets, with 20+ validators in total and about 30 testnets (some are still pending any official testnet). Please see the full list here: P-OPS Team | Decentralizing the Future
As a team that participated in many testnets and incentivized testnets, as well as mainnet launches, the most important thing would be to make sure the communications are clear and professional and on time. There were many cases where communications were not as good as needed, which led to several other problems, including participants not knowing exactly what they have to do and when, as well as delays and other issues that arised out of it. As an example, some mainnet and testnet launches started with a not too clear set of rules (or disabled modules for example), that led into 1 or 2 validators basically taking over the network for a short while. While this never ended badly, there was a risk of the network going down or being exploited by a single entity, which would have been catastrophic, especially on a mainnet launch.
We make sure we vote on all governance proposals and discuss it internally as well as with other fellow validators. If a proposal is very sensitive and potentially changes an aspect of the network that will have high impact on everyone, we usually try to discuss that within our social channels with our community members/delegators and signal our intent via a twitter post. We also support many projects with our toolings. You can find some examples on our github: P-OPS Team · GitHub. Additionally we usually launch at least a staking guide. You can see our articles on Medium, our username is: @popsteam. Additionally, we plan to be an active user of the dYdX exchange as we are now, both personally and for the team needs.
Finally, I want to highlight some of our other contributions:
- we have held an active grant for Harmony incentivized testnet, where we helped and ran the campaign together with core team members. After mainnet, we have transitioned in an external team as an additional help to the core team with devops challenges, such as running the whole testnet infra by ourselves, a faucet, delegation program etc.
- we held a grant with Axelar for helping them with technical support and testing during their incentivized testnet. While the grant is not active anymore, we still help there with technical support and technical moderation.
- we just ended a grant with Celestia team for planning, maintaining and running their incentivized testnet. Our job was to plan everything from start to finish (with contributions and help from the core team ofc), where we handled a total of 940 node operators (100 validators, 50 bridge nodes, 50 full storage nodes and 740 light nodes). The incentivized testnet named the Blockspace Race has recently ended and we are wrapping up the last remaining work. At the same time we are discussing with the core team about a new collaboration, where we would be in charge of testnet support, testnet infra (RPCs, faucets etc) and mainnet foundational delegation program amongst other things.
As an experienced validator in Tendermint based networks we would be happy and proud to support dYdX as one of the validators on both testnet and mainnet, to help secure the network and ensure its running smoothly for all users. If you want some more info about us, please see our website at pops.one (social links are at the bottom of the page).
