Validator Introduction - validator.network

Validators
1

Entity name and location
validator.network, Northern Europe

Links: Mintscan, Keplr

Infrastructure location
Copenhagen, Denmark

What kind of hardware do you run? Baremetal, cloud-based…?
Bare metal on enterprise grade hardware. All wearable parts are fully redundant with spares.
Redundant internet connectivity with 5G failover.

Technical make-up of team (elaborate on no. of dev ops engineers, experience, etc.)
2 team members, with 20+ years of devops experience each in a wide range of areas: Distributed anti-spam, ad blocking, banking, algorithmic trading and blockchain technology.

Years of experience
We have been active in the Cosmos ecosystem space since 2016/2017. We participated in all testnets of Cosmos Hub leading up the launch, and finally as a genesis validator. As such, we have extensive experience with the Tendermint / Cosmos SDK stack and how to deploy it in a safe and robust manner.

What other networks are you running validators for?
Current: dYdX, Cosmos Hub, Osmosis, Neutron, Stride and e-Money.

Past: IRIS Hub.

Based on your participation in any previous testnets, mainnets, are there any best practices to be aware of?

  • Security: Always isolate the validator process (which may become compromised) from the secret key material. We use tmkms which is a battle tested solution for this.

  • Continuous backup: Periodically it may be necessary to quickly roll back to a previous state, for instance due to database corruption (which has been known to happen with LevelDB). We use the modern ZFS file system to take frequent snapshots, which can be used to recover in a matter of seconds.

  • Continuous monitoring: Block production rates, peer traffic and mempool size are some of the key metrics to look for in validator health. We use Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring and alerting should issues arise:

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Do you have a validator voting framework and process?
We do not vote on all proposals, as this would be too time consuming considering all networks. Matters of operational urgency or affecting the future direction of the network are of course considered and voted on. Delegators can always cast their own vote which will override that of the validator and we encourage them to do so on issues they feel strongly about.

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

  • The team is working on a ecosystem-wide indexer for all Cosmos SDK chains.

  • The team may also integrate proprietary trading software with dYdX (market making and arbitrage).

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

  • Helped bring the Cosmos Hub towards launch by participating in testnets, providing helpful feedback to developers and helping form best practices around operations of Cosmos SDK chains.

  • Participated in the Cosmos Hub and IRIS Hub genesis.

  • Launched the first fiat-backed stablecoin in the Cosmos ecosystem (EEUR). Unfortunately due to lack of demand and changes in regulation, this is being unwound.

  • Developed an automated treasury delegation system for e-Money which delegates based on commission, self delegation and community party delegations. It provides a “Basic Universal Income” for validators.

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