Hey Guys,
I’m Flavian from Bware Labs, it’s a real honor for us to be among the candidates for securing the Vega protocol. Let me highlight the details regarding our company and our staking operations.
**Company: Bware Labs **
The company is registered in British Virgin Island, and it consists of 17 team members with software engineering backgrounds. More details about our team members can be found here:
https://bwarelabs.com/team
Our team is structured in 4 directions:
- Dev Ops;
- Backend Engineers;
- Frontend Engineers;
- Business Development;
Experience
We have a vast experience with Node Operations and Staking as a part of the team were working for Ankr in 2020.
At the end of 2020, Bware Labs was formed with 5 co-founders and we’ve grown to 17 team members as for today.
We have a great experience in Tendermint based blockchains (Osmosis, Sifchain, Secret) as in other L1 / L2 blockchains (Polygon / Elrond / Avalanche / Casper) and Substrate based blockchains (Moonriver / Astar). We are also involved in highly technical Indexer setups like The Graph.
A list of the projects that we validate for can be found here:
https://bwarelabs.com/validators
Security
For the private keys that are crucial for the validator ( they have funds / voting power) and are not Worker Nodes - we use our instances from AWS. We are using their proprietary services KMS (Key Management Service) and SSM (System Manager) Parameter Store.
The procedure is the following: the AWS user creates a KMS object on their IAM account and after that, creates a parameter store, which contains the private key encrypted by the KMS identity. This means that the encryption key will not be able to be accessed by anyone else than the person who owns the KMS object. In order to use the service inside the cluster or EC2 instance, you can granularly set permissions to allow the application to use the private key.
Reliability
We usually use a system of having several Sentry Nodes that are placed in front of a Validator Node, to ensure that the Validator is not getting attacked via DDOS methods.
We also have 1 to 1 backup nodes where the blockchain has built-in functionality for redundancy (Elrond), the back-ups are usually running in a different cluster region than the active Validators.
We are using Prometheus to send alerts to our internal Slack channels for an immediate response in case anything wrong happens.
Performance
The performance is ensured by using top Infrastructure Providers (AWS / Digital Ocean / Google Cloud / Azure) within the recommended hardware requirements for each project.
We have funds allocated for infrastructure costs for the following 3 years for all the projects that we are validating for.
Communication
For our technical and validator interactions, we strongly recommend discord: BwareLabs
We also have a telegram channel: Telegram: Contact @bwareLabs
Governance
We have been involved in the governance process of Polygon / Moonriver, and we bring our expertise to the table when technical decisions are to be made via the governance mechanism.