Validator Introduction - Simply Staking

Validators
1

Hey, this is Damien from Simply Staking!

We’re excited to join the dYdX community and to contribute to the chain where we can.

  • Entity name and location

    • Simply Staking, based in Malta.

  • Infrastructure location

    • We run most of our infrastructure out of our own Tier 2 datacenter from Malta. We also have back-up co-location servers in Northern Europe and also in Canada.

  • What kind of hardware do you run? Baremetal, cloud-based…? In what geographic regions?

    • We strictly make use of our own bare metal hardware. We do not make any use of cloud.

  • Technical make-up of team (elaborate on no. of dev ops engineers, experience, etc.)

    • Simply Staking is roughly 35 people with multi-disciplinary backgrounds across multiple teams including 10 DevOps engineers and 10 Software Developers.
    • Our DevOps engineers are highly skilled and experienced with multiple members having 4+ years of blockchain DevOps experience across all ecosystems.

  • Years of experience

    • 4+ years in blockchain, 10+ years of server and datacentre management.

  • What other networks are you running validators for?

    • Simply Staking currently runs on 20 Tendermint-based mainnets (such as Cosmos Hub, Osmosis, Agoric, etc), Substrate based chains, Chainlink Oracles including DyDx Stark feeds, Ethereum (LIDO Node Operator), & Oasis Network.

  • 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?

    • Overloading the testnet with too many validators 200+, causing peering issues
    • Short-notice launches of testnets and upgrades, especially due to people working in different time zones

  • Do you have a validator voting framework and process?

    • Simply Staking places high importance on governance participation on the networks it validates on. We have a dedicated governance team that monitors all of the chains for proposals.
    • We have internal tooling that allows us to easily maintain and monitor the state of the proposal (If the vote has been placed, If discussions are ongoing, etc.).
    • Whilst discussions take place actively within the governance team, we also have a governance-committee that comes together in case of high-importance proposals that can alter the network. The committee is comprised of 5 individuals and once the governance lead summarizes the proposal and presents the arguments for and against, the committee will then engage in deliberation until consensus is reached.

  • Are you planning to play any additional roles in the dYdX ecosystem (e.g. market maker, trader, indexer, front-end, other)?

    • Contributors to EntryPoint, that will be using trading functionality of DEXs across the Cosmos ecosystem including dYdX.

  • Are there other products or services you want to highlight that could be relevant for dYdX?

    • As above.

  • Any notable contributions in other ecosystems that you would like to highlight for the community?

    • We have created tooling such as Panic, ETH2 Block monitoring tool and more to come.
    • PANIC is an open source monitoring and alerting solution for Cosmos-SDK, Substrate and Chainlink based nodes.
    • ETH2 Block Proposal Monitor is a tool for Ethereum validators to monitor block proposals and rewards of their validators.

@Immutablelawyer

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