What’s up dYdX Fam! WhisperNode team checking in for duty and dropping our introduction. We’ll follow the standard format to make it as easy as possible to digest.
Entity name and location:
WhisperNode BVI Limited as a company is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands and has an entity, Whisper LLC, in Puerto Rico as well.
Infrastructure location
Our infrastructure is located all over Europe and North America including International locations like Germany, France, London, Canada, North Carolina (USA), Virginia (USA), and more.
What kind of hardware do you run? Baremetal, cloud-based…? In what geographic regions?
Whispernode currently runs bare metal servers in multiple locations around the world. We are not reliant on one provider OR one geographic location. WhisperNode runs on Baremetal servers in the aforementioned geographic locations in Europe and North America including International locations like Germany, France, London, Canada, North Carolina (USA), Virginia (USA), and more.
Technical make-up of team (elaborate on no. of dev ops engineers, experience, etc.)
1 Head of Infrastructure - Gh0st (5+ years of experience)
1 Director of Operations/sysadmin - Brendan Kittredge
1 Senior DevOps Advisor - Nick Hagianis (15+ years of experience)
Years of experience
WhisperNode has been operating validators and RPC nodes since the launch of Secret Network on 9/14/2020.
What other networks are you running validators for?
WhisperNode runs validators for over 30 Cosmos Ecosystem networks including Axelar, Archway, Asset Mantle, Aura Network, Composable Finance, Cheqd, Chihuahua, Comdex, CosmosHub, Desmos, dYdX, Empower, Evmos, Gitopia, Injective, Jackal, Juno, Kujira, Mars Hub, Migaloo, Neutron, Nomic, Osmosis, Passage, Quasar Finance, Secret Network, Sei Network, Sentinel, Stargaze, Stratos, Stride, Teritori, Terra.
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?
Best Practices:
- Be very clear on timelines and try as best as possible to choose times that the majority of validators are available.
Things to avoid:
- Be wary of where the wasm cache folder is located if the validator does not set a --home flag when initiating. There is a recent network we run on that runs the cache folder in the user’s home directory which confused many validators during upgrades as they failed to clear the cache and ran into lots of apphash errors upon restarting.
Do you have a validator voting framework and process?
We strive to be well-informed of all governance proposals prior to voting. Our process includes external discussion with other validators, delegators, and an internal discussion in our discord.
As a fully independent company, we have no external influences when it comes to governance participation, NOR do we vote on things with our own financial interests in mind. We try to be unbiased and vote based on a strong set of ethics.
After voting we do our best to inform our community of the results and be completely transparent.
Are you planning to play any additional roles in the dYdX ecosystem (e.g. market maker, trader, indexer, front-end, other)?
I plan on being a platform user and trader and also promoting use of dYdX in some trading discords I am a member of.
Are there other products or services you want to highlight that could be relevant for dYdX?
Not at this time, but we look forward to looking more into potential partnerships as we’ve done for other teams in the past.
Any notable contributions in other ecosystems that you would like to highlight for the community?
Additional Infrastructure Provider
WhisperNode provides RPC, API, and gRPC for 30+ chains
IBC Relayer
Relayer services throughout the IBC ecosystem. We’re currently the number 2 relayer IN ALL OF COSMOS in terms of packets relayed (https://relayers.smartstake.io/)
ReStake Auto-Compounding
WhisperNode provides a ReStake auto-compounding front-end fork for all supported chains.