Hello, dYdX community, this is Polkachu. 
We are excited to join the dYdX community and hope to contribute to the best of our abilities.
Entity name and location
We’re Polkachu, headquartered in United States with a global team. Our website is https://polkachu.com
Infrastructure location
Our physical infrastructure is mostly based on EU and NA. In EU, we have locations in Germany, France, UK, Finland and Poland.
What kind of hardware do you run? Baremetal, cloud-based…? In what geographic regions?
We use bare metal servers in Germany, France, UK, Finland and Poland.¬
Technical make-up of team (elaborate on no. of dev ops engineers, experience, etc.)
• Head of infrastructure with over a decade of experience
• Head of marketing with PhD from a top-5 US university
• Head of finance (CPA) with >10 years of experiences
Years of experience
We are in crypto spaces for >10 years if you count our first bitcoin purchase. We are in validation business since 2021.
What other networks are you running validators for?
Today, we run validators in many PoS blockchains. Our main focus is on Tendermint-based blockchains. We are active on 8ball, Agoric, Akash, Asset Mantle, Aura Network, Axelar, Bitcanna, Bitsong, Canto, Chihuahua, Comdex, Composable Finance, Cosmos Hub, Crescent, Empower, Evmos, Fetch, Gitopia, Gravity Bridge, Injective, Jackal, Juno, Kava, Kichain, Konstellation, Kujira, Loyal, Mars Protocol, Meme, Migaloo, Neutron, Noble, Nois, Nolus, Nomic, Nym, Omniflix, Osmosis, Passage, Persistence, Planq, Quasar, Quicksilver, Shentu, Sifchain, Sommelier, Stargaze, Stride, Teritori, Terra, Umee, UnUniFi, XPLA. The total staked value from our delegators are $53M.
We also validate on Substrate-based chains (Polkadot, Kusama, and Polkadex) and other major Layer-1s (Aptos, Avalanche and NEAR).
Overall, delegators/nominators have trusted us with close to $100M in crypto assets. You can find more information about us on our website (https://polkachu.com).
Do you have a validator voting framework and process?
We actively participate in the on-chain governance and engage with the community on Discord. We publish all our on-chain votes for transparency.
Are you planning to play any additional roles in the dYdX ecosystem (e.g. market maker, trader, indexer, front-end, other)?
We will support dYdX in our popular infrastructure services such as snapshot, state-sync, etc. More details below.
Are there other products or services you want to highlight that could be relevant for dYdX?
Polkachu is not only a trusted validators on proof-of-stake blockchains, but also a major infrastructure provider for these projects, especially in the Cosmos Ecosystem. We have 7 main infrastructure products. We will support dYdX with all these products.
- State-Sync: Polkachu provides state-sync servers and guides. Node operators can quickly sync up a node with minimum storage requirement. Currently we support state-sync on 52 chains.
- Node Snapshot: Polkachu provides node snapshots for node operators to quickly sync up a node. These nodes are frequently state-synced to reduce the storage requirement. Currently we support node snapshot on 53 chains.
- Public RPC, API and gRPC: Polkachu offers public RPC endpoints for 54 chains, API endpoints for 53 chains, and gRPC endpoints for 53 chains.
- Miscellaneous Node Operator Support: Polkachu offers many other miscellaneous node operator supporting tools.
– Live peers for 54 chain.
– Seed nodes for 53 chains.
– addrbook.json files for 53 chains.
– Genesis mirror download for 53 chains.
– Node installation guides for 48 chains.
– CLI command cheatsheets for 51 chains. - Interchain Upgrade Watcher: We keep track of network upgrades, provide upgrade guides and show live consensus progress at the upgrade height. Currently we support chain upgrades on 51 chains.
- Network Scan: We periodically scan the network and uncover validator nodes with open RPC port. We then automatically alert the node operators if we find a contact email on chain. Currently we support network scan on 54 chains.
- Testnet Labs: While the above products are designed for mainnets, we also offer supports for many testnets with the similar suite of product offerings.
To support the blockchain communities, we also run IBC relayers to support hundreds of IBC channels for the Cosmos ecosystem at our own cost. Currently, we operate 37 relayer hubs and 139 bi-directional IBC channels.
Any notable contributions in other ecosystems that you would like to highlight for the community?
We open-source our deployment scripts and provide community tools for validators and delegators alike.
Our open-source scripts include:
- Polkadot/Kusama Node Deployment Script
- Other Substrate-Based Node Deployment Script
- Tendermint-Based Node Deployment Script
- Monitoring Server Deployment Script
- Secure Server Setup for Validator
- IBC Relayer Deployment Script