Kleomedes - Validator Profile

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Kleomedes: Sovereign Infrastructure for the Cosmos Ecosystem

Hello, Cosmonauts!

We are Kleomedes, and we operate sovereign, bare-metal infrastructure from Naples, Italy.

The Cosmos ecosystem has been our home since early 2020, when we began validating a handful of chains. In January of 2026, we joined the Cosmos Hub active set. We believe that decentralization should extend beyond consensus rules. It should also apply to the physical infrastructure and geographic distribution of the organizations responsible for running the network. There are many qualified providers validating the hub, but let us explain why we bring a few more things to the table beyond simply signing blocks. We hope these contributions are enough to convince you that we are deserving of your delegation.

Introduction to Kleomedes

Kleomedes was founded in 2020 by Marco Rinaldi with a simple objective: build reliable blockchain infrastructure without depending on a handful of cloud providers and data centers used by much of the industry.

Instead of renting our core infrastructure from Hetzner, OVH, AWS, Google Cloud, or other centralized providers, we purchase, assemble, rack, and maintain our own server pods. Our infrastructure is housed across several locations in Naples, Italy. This gives us direct control over the hardware, minimizing any trust assumptions for maintenance and security. Our pods are equipped with state of the art monitoring and redundancy to ensure liveness despite any natural disaster or power outage. Most importantly, operating from Southern Italy improves the geographic diversity of the networks we support while reducing exposure to cloud and data-center failures.

Our philosophy is straightforward…

Decentralized networks deserve infrastructure that is operationally and physically decentralized.

Who We Are

Our team combines over 30 years of experience in AI work flows, systems engineering, blockchain operations, data analysis, business development and community governance.

Since 2020, we have grown from a Cosmos validator into a broader Web3 infrastructure provider supporting protocols, foundations, developers, and delegators. Today, our work includes:

  • Operating validators across 20+ mainnets and testnets
  • Serving 80+ million RPC relays daily across 30+ EVM chains and Solana
  • Providing snapshot services for all of the networks we validate
  • Building and maintaining chain specific dashboards, blockchain indexers and analytics APIs
  • Maintaining 24/7 monitoring and incident-response systems
  • Producing validator performance and decentralization analytics (ie, stake-hub.xyz)
  • Supporting foundation delegation programs with our objective analytics platform

Performance and Technical Expertise

We have maintained >99.9% historical validator uptime without a double-signing incident or slashing event. At the same time, we believe security must take precedence over blindly maximizing liveness. Our architecture is designed to prevent key compromise and double-signing while minimizing downtime through redundancy, monitoring, and tested recovery procedures. We use TMKMS to sign blocks on sub-second blockchains while the rest of our networks use Horcrux.

We provide free public RPC, REST, and gRPC endpoints for developers, wallets, explorers, indexers, and community members. We also maintain database snapshots that allow new validators and node operators to synchronize their nodes quickly.

Stake-Hub.xyz

We created Stake-Hub to make staking easier to understand for suers. Stake-Hub also provides validator performance data, governance information, yield analytics, and decentralization metrics intended to help users make better-informed delegation decisions.

Analytics and Indexing

Our team has experience building chain-specific indexers and analytics platforms. This includes Namadata, which is a now deprecated analytics platform previously developed for the Namada ecosystem. It provided information on IBC transactions, service health monitoring, node geolocation, and validator analytics. Our expertise with indexers and dashboards allow us to easily re-purpose dashboards for each chain’s specific needs. Our Pocket Provider dashboard is an example of this, showing where the best opportunities lie for provider’s seeking to launch services on Pocket Network.

Open-Source Contributions

We publish and contribute to open-source tools, chain configurations, monitoring systems, dashboards, and community repositories. Our public work can be found through our Github.

How We Make Governance Decisions

We view governance as one of a validator’s core responsibilities, not an administrative task to be completed shortly before a voting period ends.

Our governance process generally follows five steps:

  1. Review the complete proposal. We read the on-chain proposal, related forum discussions, supporting documentation, code changes, budgets, and relevant historical proposals.
  2. Evaluate its effects. We consider network security, decentralization, technical feasibility, treasury impact, economic sustainability, governance precedent, and the interests of users and delegators.
  3. Consult the community and relevant experts. We discuss important proposals within our community channels and seek clarification from contributors, developers, or subject-matter experts when necessary.
  4. Identify conflicts of interest. We consider whether Kleomedes has any commercial or operational relationship that could influence the decision. Any material conflict should be acknowledged rather than concealed. If there are material conflicts, then we may abstain and leave the vote to our delegators.
  5. Vote and communicate our reasoning. We vote based on the long-term health of the network and, when practical, publish a concise explanation of our decision.

We do not automatically vote with large stakeholders, foundations, other validators, or our own short-term commercial interests. Delegator feedback is taken seriously, but we also recognize that a validator must exercise independent judgment after reviewing the available evidence.

We encourage delegators to participate directly in governance. On Cosmos Hub, a delegator’s direct vote takes precedence over the validator’s vote for that delegator’s stake. We believe this is an important protection and regularly encourage our community to use it.

Our Hopes and Goals for the Cosmos Hub

We want the Cosmos Hub to remain a credibly neutral center of coordination, security, and public infrastructure for the broader interchain ecosystem. We are also big proponents of constructive (and respectful!) criticism, rather than simply agreeing with the status quo.

Our priorities for the Hub include:

  • Strengthening ATOM’s role within the interchain economy
  • Developing sustainable sources of value for ATOM stakers (via revenue)
  • Improving the transparency and accountability of community spending
  • Preserving credible neutrality while supporting ecosystem growth
  • Supporting open-source infrastructure and public goods
  • Reducing geographic, infrastructure-provider, and voting-power concentration
  • Making it easier for new developers, users, and institutions to enter Cosmos

We hope to see a Cosmos Hub that is economically sustainable without abandoning the principles that made Cosmos important: sovereignty, interoperability, permissionless innovation, and community governance. Kleomedes intends to contribute to that future as both a validator and a broader infrastructure provider.

If you’d like to support us on Cosmos Hub, feel free to delegate to our validator using Keplr wallet.

Contact Kleomedes

Thank you for taking the time to learn more about us. We welcome any questions!

3 Likes
2

Welcome to the forum. Stake-Hub sounds useful for people trying to compare validators. Does it also explain the different metrics in plain language for newer delegators who may not know what each one means?

1 Like
3

Appreciate the question! Right now, stake-hub is essentially another way for users to stake outside keplr wallet. The main thing it adds is the “decentralize delegations” button which randomly picks a few validators within the middle of the pack to delegate to.

The goal was to eventually create a feature that helps new validators bootstrap delegations by initially delegating to someone within the middle of the set and once enough commitments have been made to support a new validator, having AuthZ re-delegate to that validator to bring it well into the active set (at least 10-20 spots from the bottom of the set). That way people can continue earning rewards while also signaling support to bring new validators onboard while also decreasing the risk of missing out on rewards if they end up falling out of the set as soon as they get in. This isn’t live yet but if enough users want it, its something we can work on again.

Otherwise, all the other features I described (performance for ancillary services and geolocation) are primarily used by foundations when making decisions about foundation delegation programs. Users can still see that data but it’s not necessarily geared towards that audience.

I have attached a screenshot that shows you what users see when they use the staking interface. It is similar to mintscan but simplified UI.

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1 Like
4

Thanks for explaining. The “decentralize delegations” option sounds useful. A short, plain-language explanation of why those validators are selected would probably help newer users feel more comfortable using it.

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If you look at the bottom of the window there is a blurb there, right above the delegate button. If you feel it could be refined/made better, feel free to suggest any changes and we can implement them!

6

I see it now, thanks. The explanation itself is clear, but it was easy to miss at the bottom. Maybe placing it closer to the “Selected Validators” heading or making it slightly more noticeable would help newer users understand the selection before delegating.

1 Like