Hello from the RockawayX Infrastructure Team. We would like to help dYdX project to be truly decentralized!
- Entity name and location
Rockaway Blockchain GP Ltd| Cayman Island
- Infrastructure location
Central Europe
- What kind of hardware do you run? Baremetal, cloud-based…? In what geographic regions?
We use our own bare-metal servers in three Tier 3 colocation centers in Central Europe region. All our servers are operated exclusively by our internal team, so no 3rd parties are involved in server operation. Our total internet throughput is 30 Gb/s. We genuinely believe in decentralization and sovereignty of blockchains, so we do not use any big centralized providers, but our infra is located a few miliseconds from the biggest hubs in European hubs.
- Technical make-up of team (elaborate on no. of dev ops engineers, experience, etc.)
Our team consists of 5 full-time in-house SRE with deep experience in various blockchain ecosystems. In total our team has 43 years of experience in Infra operations for big Web2 players in eCommerce and eGrocery segments.
- Years of experience
RockawayX has 6 years of experience in Blockchain ecosystem VC investing. We have been operating blockchain validators / RPC nodes since 2020. We have multiple divisions including Credit Fund (providing liquidity to projects) and Labs division (Venture development studio)
- What other networks are you running validators for?
Solana, Ethereum, Vega, Cosmos Hub, Neutron, NYM, Sommelier, Agoric, Axelar, Quicksilver, White whale, POKT, Stride, Persistence and many others in testnet phase (notably Aleo, Dymension and others). We are also operating bunch of full nodes for EVM L2 like Avalanche, Polygon, Kava, etc…
- 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?
It is all about communication from the team. There needs to be good guidance from the developers on how to operate their software, do not rely on validators they will figure it out somehow magically. What is also crucially important is the security incident handling, there needs to be precise communication (with all the details) about what happened and what is the recommended way to solve the issue from the developer perspective.
- Do you have a validator voting framework and process?
Yes, we have our internal monitoring solution for all chains we are participating in as a validator. We are also part of Validator commons. Our framework starts with assessing the proposal and for technical proposals we go through the changelogs with the technical team if it is a proposal with financial impact, we go through the proposal with our analytical team from the investment part of our Company.
- Are you planning to play any additional roles in the dYdX ecosystem (e.g. market maker, trader, indexer, front-end, other)?
Our Credit fund team is internally discussing market maker/trader role.
- Are there other products or services you want to highlight that could be relevant for dYdX?
As mentioned before, we genuinely believe in decentralization, thus we are building tools to observe and improve decentralization for PoS. For observation we are operating Observatory – https:// observatory.zone and for improvement we have 2 products for stake decentralization – Smart Delegation Program (For foundations) - https:// smartdelegation.app and Stakebar (For retail) https://stakebar.io
- Any notable contributions in other ecosystems that you would like to highlight for the community?
As a labor of love, we organize the biggest European Cosmos conference – Gateway to Cosmos. https://gateway.events