Validator introduction- Validatrium

Entity name and location

Validatrium, LDA- Lisboa, Portugal

A few words about us:

Validatrium.com

Pro team of 15 specialists

High-performance server hardware located in the largest data centers in Europe

One of the top 130 validators in the industry in Europe

Full project launch cycle

2 years of experience with launching more than 140 Nodes in various networks: including ETH 2.0, Axelar, Kyve, Oasis, Aleph Zero, Clover, Vega, Chihuahua, Umbrella, Shiden, Evmos, Calamari, Near, Graph, Comdex, NYM, HydraDX, Velas, Centrifuge, Odin, Ollo Station, KAVA, Rebus, LUM, Basilisk, Razor, Aura, BitSong, Cudos, Forta, Passage, Bit.Country, Agoric, Pokt, C4e, Uptick, Umee

Depending on the project, our team is always trying to find the best solution to engage with the community, so we can create something special to gather! We make process of joining the project and developing it smooth and as fast as possible.

Infrastructure location

Germany, Austria, Poland, Finland

What kind of hardware do you run?

Baremetal, cloud-based…? In what geographic regions?

For our infrastructure we prefer to use baremetal servers. The most common setup:

CPU: Ryzen 9 5950x

RAM: 128GB ECC

SSD: 2x4TB NVME

Network: 1GB/s

Or similar to this.

We use several different providers such as contabo, hetzner, digital ocean and AWS. All of them have authority among the community.

We also use virtualization - proxmox. There are multiple benefits:

Virtual machines have flexible hardware. And can be expanded when needed.

VMs are easy to copy, replicate, backup&restore and move between hosts without losing uptime.

VMs are behind NAT, all of the nodes doesn’t have external access. Only p2p port allowed from outside (if there is no other required option)

As a monitoring solutions we use Zabbix and Grafana. Instant alerts via different sources such as telegram, email or slack. Everything is done to guarantee the highest possible level of quality, stability and availability

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

Our team works 24/7

4 devops 1 day/1 night

Alerting system notify all team, what help decrease time reaction on problem

We have our internal documentation for each project.

This allows our tech specialists to solve the issues as soon as possible.

Extensive experience with various networks, more than 140 nodes are curently up and running

.

Devops

  1. 10+ years of experience as a SysOps engineer
  • Strong background with Nginx and Load Balancing

  • Strong knowledge of DevOps practices

  • Experience working with Git (GitOps)

  • Understanding of networks and protocols — TCP/IP stack

  • Practical skills in build own CDN

  • Practical skill of building high load systems

  • Experience working with Ansible

  • Good knowledge of Bash or Python scripting

  • Strong background with Docker and Kubernetes

  • Practical skills in database deployment (MySQL, PostgreSQL) and performance tuning

  • At least an intermediate level of English

  1. 20+ years in systems administration, systems engineering, systems programming

Network management, network engineering, solution design and launch of network infrastructure projects

Creating, configuring and managing cluster solutions, experience in building distributed systems and cluster

Design and implementation of high-load and high-availability systems

  1. 5 years as system administration, devops engineer and tech support.

Experienced in more then 70 crypto project’s nodes. Sentry, archive, public etc.

  • Understanding of TCP/IP model,

  • Git, Docker, Ansible, Zabbix

Programming languages: Python, NodeJS.

Bash scripting.

Worked with: web servers, databases, grafana, VPNs

What other networks are you running validators for?

Mainnets: Axelar, Kyve, Oasis, Aleph Zero, Clover, Vega, Chihuahua, Umbrella, Shiden, Evmos, Calamari, Near, Graph, Comdex, NYM, HydraDX, Velas, Centrifuge, Odin, Ollo Station, KAVA, Rebus, LUM, Basilisk, Razor, Aura, BitSong, Cudos, Forta, Passage, Bit.Country, Agoric, Pokt, C4e, Uptick, Umee

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?

Well, it depends on organization first.

What is good to make a smooth launch:

1.Google form for validators, which describes their background and experience in projects

2.divide testnet on several phases: non incentivized- to check and select reliable validators, incentivized phase-continĂşe selecting validators, that phase should be based on special tasks, private(like pre mainnet) with selected validators to prepare for mainnet launch

Separated channels in discord, to avoid missing important announcements

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

Korean community and DAO

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

as a professional validator, we run 160+ nodes in 65+ networks, and we contribute not only as a validator, but as a community, governance, marketing, etc

Evmos: helped to restart mainnet network after network halt on mainnet start

BitSong: took part in creating Governance DAO (overall 5 members + project team)

Q network: conducted AMA session with Q team via Validatrium social channels

Agoric: offered plan on getting rid of spam proposals in February 2023

and much more…

1 Like