Hey all, Gleb from Greenfield One here. Having supported Vega from the seed stage in 2019, we are incredibly excited for the potential to provide infrastructure and actively participate in bootstrapping the validator set from day one!
Company: Greenfield One
Greenfield One is Berlin-based early-stage crypto fund. We have been incredibly impressed with the advancements of the Vega tech stack as well as the community it gathered along the way. You can read more on why we backed Vega here.
We believe, as an active investor, this is our mandate to support networks across the entirety of their lifecycle. In addition to providing capital in the early stages, this means leveraging our holdings to help bootstrap the network itself - running genesis validators, providing liquidity to the markets and participating in governance.
As early supporters and long-term holders we believe that our incentives are well-aligned with the rest of the ecosystem to be operating a Vega validator.
Meet the Team & Experience
For the team section we decided to go a bit more personal and show you the faces behind the validator who will be responsible for the operations, infrastructure, community and governance
Gleb - senior analyst at GF1 and responsible for the strategy, community and business aspects around validation. Previously founded and led the first enterprise staking unit at Deutsche Telekom, having operated Chainlink, Flow and Celo validators. Editor at stakingrewards.com - the leading website for staking-related data and open-source contributor to PoS networks like Livepeer.
Jendrik - head of engineering at GF1, responsible for technical dd, on-chain data analytics and infrastructure. With his passion on stream processing and crypto protocols he co-built TokenAnalyst, an on-chain analytics company providing fast data to crypto hedge funds across the world. Coinbase acquired the team to flesh out their on-chain analytics stack, specifically for Ethereum. At GF1, Jendrik works with the technical side of the company on running infrastructure and on-chain analytics jobs. For our portfolio companies he’s often building dashboards on Dune.
Felix - head of research at GF1, focused on governance and cryptoeconomics. He has been a core member of the firm from day one and led multiple research initiatives around governance like the extensive paper on the state of blockchain governance or the recently published paper on the long-term incentive alignment.
As Greenfield One we are currently operating on several testnets, including Tendermint-based nodes on NYM as well as oracles for Stakewise. Individually our background spans providing infrastructure to multiple blockchain networks.
Security, Reliability and Performance
We’re using third party regulated and licensed custody providers where possible. If it’s not possible due to technical requirements of the respective chain, we prefer using HSMs where supported for consensus signing keys, and/or Ledger devices for custodial keys. Cold storage is held replicated and sharded.
Our infrastructure is physically located in different, geographically dispersed data centers. All services are duplicated. We use various tools to monitor (e.g. Prometheus/PagerDuty) and set up (e.g. Infrastructure as Code) our services and are ready 24/7 to fix them.
Our instances are NVMe-based to ensure fast I/O and over-provision CPU/Network (in relation to requirements) from the start to ensure against resource spikes.
Communication
You can reach me for any questions over Telegram or email (gleb@greenfield.one). You can also find everyone from our team on Twitter (DMs open).
In case we get elected into the Vega validator set, we will set up a dedicated Telegram channel for communicating with our delegates and addressing all questions in one place.
Governance
Governance has been one of the focuses of our research within GF1. Felix has published multiple research pieces and is a long-time advocate for the long-term incentive alignment in blockchain networks. While this hasn’t directly shaped PoS networks, it has contributed to the governance discussion in DeFi projects such as Idle, Stakewise and Balancer. We also helped design governance models for some of our portfolio companies.
Our investor status paired with potentially running a validator, puts us in a very clear long-term position to be incentivized to take on an active governance role.
