Baryon validator profile

🌠 Mainnet Validators
1

TEAM / COMPANY / DAO
Baryon Capital is a new validator company founded by experienced node operators, DevOps, community leaders and investors. We are in close relationships with a) crypto communities including student orgs; b) cryptofunds in/out of Korea; c) community builders; and, d) marketing/PR experts.

Daniel is in charge of leading Baryon as Managing Partner. He used to work at Lunamint and DSRV as a main node operator; and has been heavily involved with Cosmos-related projects for node operation.

John is in charge of Business Development for Baryon as Partner. He used to be one of the co-founders of Nonce, the biggest crypto hub in Korea that provides co-living and co-working spaces for crypto people in Seoul. As one of the early crypto evangelists, he is starting his own cryptofund called a41 Ventures that will work closely with Baryon for its validator partner.

Danny is one of the partners at Baryon. And, he is in charge of student blockchain club in Yonsei University (YBL) and is also leading Phusis Labs, a research lab with the focus on core contribution and education. Danny is working closely with other universities (Berkeley, Columbia, UPenn and so on) and prominent players in the industry (Figment, Flow, Mina etc). Phusis will work closely with Baryon for community contribution and ecosystem building.

Kai is Partner at Baryon and he is main node operator along with Daniel. He has been a crypto space for more than five years as a co-founder of BPRatings on EOS platform and as a blockchain developer in Lambda256 and DSRV Labs. Currently, he is building a farming pool on Chia Network and serving as a mentor for non-blockchain developers in many education programs.

EXPERIENCE
We have 3+ years of node operation experience with multiple networks including Cosmos, Flow, Solana and Mina. And, our node operators have always been at the top of the testnet competition that we participated so far.

[Baryon’s Previous Node Operation Experiences]

  • Cosmos
  • Terra
  • Osmosis
  • Certik
  • Sifchain
  • Persistence
  • ThorChain
  • Regen
  • Iris
  • Flow
  • Solana
  • Mina
  • Casper

Security
Security is one of the areas where validators should put significant considerations. Although we cannot disclose specific architecture here due to info sec issue, we will give you a brief walkthrough on how we approach this area:

  1. As an active user of HSM/KMS, we developed our own in-house KMS that securely handles every operation that involves the use of the private key. Since our KMS maintain secure audit logs to keep track of the keys for security purposes, abnormal and/or unreliable activities are detected immediately.
    (For certain networks that have network latency due to their blockchain nature, we may not use this software to maintain high uptime.)

  2. We have proprietary software for machines, too. To maintain real-time protection, the proprietary software detects any abnormal activities or events (within 100ms) and immediately puts the situation under control.

Reliability / Performance
We have experiences and know-hows on ensuring high availability, stability and performance. To illustrate further on this, we will lay out how we have operated nodes with aforementioned list of projects:

  1. Pre-analysis and Architecture Design
  • Our architecture puts emphasis on the most optimal performance as a node operator. This includes an optimal machine load and reduced network latency. This sometimes results into very different validator architecture approach even among the Cosmos family projects. For instance, the approach we took on building the architecture for Cosmos and Terra was significantly different.
  • We always get our hands dirty by participating heavily in testnet; and communicate frequently with the proejct and community when we find bugs or issues. For instance, prior to the Cosmos mainnet launch, Baryon members found an issue with 32bit architecture and solved this issue with the Cosmos team.
  1. Sentry / Validator Node Isolation
  • We always separate the validator node from network and protect the validator node with multiple Sentry Nodes. Indeed, our validator node only establishes private connections to our multiple sentry nodes so that it could be protected. Moreover, we employ Reserve Node in case of emergency. The current architecture protects Baryon validator node from DDoS attack.
  1. Multi-Cloud & Multi-Region
  • We are currently utilizing 5+ cloud services. By keeping ourselves cloud-agnostic, we could provide consistent node operation service to the networks we participate.
  1. 24/7, 365 Monitoring
  • We always respond promptly and professionally when we encounter node issue for the operators have developed proprietary monitoring system.
  • Node Agent: monitors the status of various machines.
  • Independent Agent: monitors the validator status from outside through RPC.
  • Grafana & Prometheus

Communication

  • Mail : support@baryon.capital
  • Discord : Daniel | Baryon#2376
  • Telegram : @danielkim89

Governance
We believe that validators are obliged to engage heavily with delegators and provide protection and stability to the network. And, we think of “governance” as a very important pillar for the future validator work; for we see that governance-as-a-service will become as big as or even bigger than node operation-as-a-service.

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