Simply Staking - Validator Profile

About Simply Staking Simply Staking is a team of security and computer engineers operating blockchain infrastructure on multiple PoS blockchain networks, both in test and live environments. The group operates infrastructure out of its own Tier 3 datacentre, with various backup sites across the globe, and a policy against the use of cloud providers. Our PoS infrastructure includes multiple layers of sentries per network, hosted locally and at colocated servers of ours. Some of these are private and locked down, serving also as backup validator nodes, and others are public to provide the rest of our infrastructure with better global peer connectivity. Why Private Infrastructure? We believe that new, decentralised public infrastructure requires a set of independent, geographically distributed validators operating their own private infrastructure. The fact that many validators rely on cloud infrastructure puts this vision of a decentralised future in jeopardy, by inadvertently centralising networks on a handful of cloud networks that are owned by large corporations. How long have we been active We are one of the original validators that formed part of the genesis of the…

Excerpt (1199 of 4398 characters). Read the whole post on the forum ↗

Hey, I have a question for you about your sentry setup and btw, super great intro!

“multiple layers of sentries”

so, like this:

1 validator → 3 sentries → 3 sentries for each of the validator’s 3 sentries?

or something else?

thanks!

Hey Jacob!

We have the usual public sentries (between 2-5 depending on the network), however on some networks we also have private sentries which are connected to known peers and our own. I guess “multiple layers” sounds like there’s a deeper tree of sentries.

In reality these are mostly useful in case there’s a p2p ddos exploit and in scenarios where the primary validator node has issues. In the past, we tried a validator → private sentry → public sentry setup, but that turned out to be overkill. As the number of validators grow on some networks, even the public sentry layer starts to inhibit optimal performance.

This will most likely not be relevant once we implement a distributed signer like horcrux, as there’ll be no primary node.

Thanks a lot!

Love hearing about how others do it.

Our setup varies from chain to chain but default mode is without sentries.

GitHub - notional-labs/cosmosia: Cosmos Infrastructure Automation

Cosmos Infrastructure Automation. Contribute to notional-labs/cosmosia development by creating an account on GitHub.

gives us a big old global network of nodes, and when we think we need to use sentries, our validators connect to nodes that are used to serve rpc endpoints by cosmosia