Hey all! Xave from Chorus One here. Really excited to potentially have the chance to contribute to securing Vega in the early-stages in order to ensure the long-term success of it.
Company: Chorus One
Chorus One is a leading staking service provider, securing over $1bn in staked assets. In 2018, whilst hosting Epicenter, Meher Roy and Brian Crain (co-founders of Chorus One) realised there would be an opportunity to run validator infrastructure across a multitude of decentralised networks as it became evident that Proof-of-Stake would become the future standard for decentralised network security. Fast forwarding to 2021, Chorus One has now grown to a team of 22 ambitious and self-reflective individuals on a mission to advance peer-to-peer collaboration at scale. We are a Swiss AG company. Our terms of service can be found here.
Chorus One Experience
We are currently operating validating nodes on 25 decentralised networks and have over 3 years of experience running nodes on Tendermint-based PoS chains. We were one of the first staking providers to run a node on Cosmos back in 2018 and since then we have onboarded 10+ Tendermint-based PoS chains. We have maintained >99% uptime across all networks that we have run nodes on.
We also value contributing to the ecosystems and networks that we run nodes on and strive to build tools and/or produce content for all networks we support. We are currently building a Celo-Cosmos bridge and a liquid staking solution for Solana (Lido). We also regularly post content (Chorus One – Medium, Chorus One - YouTube) that contributes to the betterment of the PoS ecosystem.
Apart from the above, one of the co-founders of Chorus One (Brian Crain) is Vice-Chairman of the Interchain Foundation. In general, we are strongly aligned and have significant expertise with Tendermint-based PoS chains.
Chorus One Security
Maintaining best key management practices is paramount for Chorus One. It is our preference to use HSMs where supported for consensus signing keys, and Ledger Nano S/X devices (or other hardware-based cold storage solutions) for custodial keys. Management of secrets beyond cryptographic keys is handled using Hashicorp Vault; a FIPS-compliant secrets management engine, deployed in a highly available configuration.
Chorus One Reliability
Our infrastructure is designed to be secure, highly available and redundant. Based upon a high-availability Kubernetes cluster, our infrastructure spans five datacenters in two European countries, and two distinct vendors and as such is tolerant of failure of a complete datacenter, or vendor. More info on the principles used to design our infrastructure can be found here (in the meantime somewhat outdated).
Chorus One Performance
Our infrastructure comprises nodes based upon the latest AMD Ryzen architecture, with NVME-based storage replicated across three hosts for immediate automated migration of containers to a new host in the event of host failure. Hosts are managed using Saltstack, for codified configuration management, to ensure homogeneity of hardware configuration across our estate, and changes are subject to rigorous peer-review.
Chorus One Communication
We understand that delegators care about the networks that they are securing. We have an active Telegram that anyone is welcome to join. Our Telegram community is an open-place where delegators can discuss important network updates such as upgrades and governance votes, amongst other things. In terms of specific technical communication, we have an on-call roster that responds to support tickets 24/7.
Chorus One Governance
We are active in governance on all networks that we run nodes on and place a high-importance on listening to our delegators for all governance proposals to ensure we sufficiently represent the majority of our delegators appropriately. Any governance proposal can be discussed in our Telegram community.
Not only do we listen to delegators for existing proposals, but we also are thoughtful in creating new proposals to improve aspects of networks that we run nodes on. For example, we initially created the proposal for Cosmos to enable inflation on the network to boost security of it.
We would be delighted to be chosen to be a part of Vega’s initial validator set if we are deemed suitable for it. Thanks for your time!