Team / Company / DAO
Hi everyone! This is the Provalidator team.
Before we start our post, there are two things we want to highlight. First, we want to thank the Vega team for giving the opportunity to contribute to the project as an early validator. This open process of selecting network guardians is unique, and we are honored to participate in it.
Second, as our title implies, Provalidator is contending for the Vega validator as a partnership between a professional staking provider and a crypto community. Since the team has accentuated the importance of community engagement, we decided to collaborate with an energetic Korean crypto community with 1,500 members.
Professional Staking Provider: Provalidator
Provalidator (website: https://provalidator.com) is a professional Proof-of-Stake validator and decentralized infrastructure provider. We started to validate Tendermint/Cosmos SDK chains in 2020. While our brand is relatively new, our team isn’t.
We are a team of six bright minds, and our CTO and Lead Engineer are experienced node operators since 2018. Other team members come from crypto VCs, blockchain research, and quantitative trading background.
We support base layer networks along with early stage blockchain applications through validation and accelerating. Specifically, we help new protocols build validator communities and expand their ecosystem through technical feedback and strategic advising.
Korean Crypto Community: Legit Kimchi
Legit Kimchi (Telegram: Contact @LegitKimchi) is a South Korean crypto community with 1,500 crypto enthusiasts. Managed by @Oreum (aka Kimchi Boss), Legit Kimchi has been a platform for educating, engaging, and empowering Korean crypto natives. Furthermore, around 1,900 local crypto members are following their news channel (Telegram: Contact @kimchicrypto).
The objective of this partnership is to expand the Vega community in Korea. Currently, there is a Vega Korea Telegram group with approximately 600 members. We want to further solidify the Korean community by converting Coinlist token sale participants in Korea to actual users of the Vega Protocol once released.
We, the Provalidator team, ourselves are also community-building experts. We are currently managing the Cosmos Korea community, where we share and spread news, updates, information, and ecosystem projects specifically in Korea through localized channels including Naver Café(think of it as Reddit), Telegram, Twitter, etc.
Cosmos Korea
-Telegram: Contact @Cosmos_Korea
-Twitter: https://twitter.com/cosmosskorea?lang=en
-Medium: Cosmos Korea – Medium
-Naver Café: ÄÚ½º¸ð½ºÄÚ¸®¾Æ : ³×À̹ö Ä«Æä
We believe that validators have the responsibility and the privilege to support the community in the early days. As firm believers of the Vega Protocol, we would like to exercise our validator and community-building know-hows and experiences for the project’s success.
Experience
Provalidator is currently running mainnet validator nodes on Cosmos Hub, Regen Network, Sifchain, and Osmosis. For testnets, we run validators on Agoric, NYM and Axelar. Toward the end of the year, we’re planning to join Tgrade and Koii Network’s testnet along with a few other layer-one PoS projects that haven’t launched yet.
Below is a summary of our contributions and achievements on other networks.
- Dev team has been validating numerous networks, including Cosmos, Solana, Terra, Iris, Kava, Persistence, Sifchain, Agoric, Mina, Flow and ThorChain
- Cosmos: Cosmos Game of Stakes “Never Jailed” winner (part of our dev team is from Lunamint)
- Regen Network: Ranked 3rd in Regen Network’s final incentivized testnet “Aplikigo”
- Sifchain: Onboarded other validators and helped build Sifchain’s validator community
- Osmosis: Created Telegram bots that fetch on-chain data regarding staking
Security
Securely managing private keys is the quintessential work of running a validator. We use HSM and KMS for every procedure that requires the usage of signing keys. We acknowledge that key management software may, time to time, put strain on validator operations. Thus, on top of our default security setup, we add or remove specific KMS based on the guidance given out by the project team.
Reliability
Our architecture is designed to achieve stability, speed, security, and scalability. For our Cosmos Hub and other Tendermint/Cosmos SDK validator nodes, we adopt additional layers of sentry nodes to isolate the validator node from the network. Multi-cloud multi-region is unquestionable, and we monitor our nodes manually (3 devs standby) and automatically (Grafana, Prometheus, etc.).
Our team periodically tests our professional operation procedures, and we are internally pushing for an integrated dashboard for our overall operation. To respond to emergencies, we always prepare reserve nodes and use snapshots to restore our node. Our primary focus is to avoid double-signing, and our emergency measures are validated through our team’s internal testnet.
Performance
Before we decide to join a network as a validator, our protocol experts and developers go through the required setup and performance benchmarks that is laid out by the team. We then conclude the optimal structure for achieving liveness but not compromising safety at the same time. We prefer to use bare-metal servers supplementary to multiple cloud providers, but the final design depends heavily on the network itself.
Communication
Contact us via the following:
Email: support@provalidator.com
Telegram: @Provalidator
Twitter: https://twitter.com/provalidator
Medium: Provalidator Blog – Medium
Governance
Considering the nature of our partnership, we will closely keep our eyes and ears open to the local Korean Vega community and participate in governance activity accordingly. Meanwhile, we highly respect the project team’s opinion as well. Our role as a validator has always been coordinating and adjusting different ideas between diverse stakeholders. We firmly believe in the virtue of collective intelligence and will actively participate in the Vega Protocol governance.