Notional's delegations program

Conversation
1

There are now several chains, where notional isn’t quite a whale yet, but we ain’t doing bad. We want this opportunity to exist for others, which is actually been the source of the historical tension between notional and the ICF, for example.

We believe in leadership by example, so we’re only going to delegate 1,000 atoms to ourself total.

With the remaining atoms in our validator wallet, and the atoms that we received from proposal 104, we are making delegations to validators who are ranked lower than notional, and make significant contributions to the ecosystem .

We are openly biased.

Because we are openly biased, it should be easy for validators to self-evaluate if they can receive a delegation from notional’s approximately 127,000 atoms that we will not delegate to ourselves.

  • Code
  • Relaying
  • Participation here on the forum
  • Participation in governance
  • Media production
  • Use of bare metal servers
  • Alignment with Notional’s values of transparency and accountability

Furthermore, we have decided to adopt this policy on every chain where we feel that we hold a significant bag, and have significant community support in the form of delegations from the community.

Going from memory, those chains are:

  • Osmosis
  • Cosmos Hub
  • Juno
  • EVMOS
  • Migaloo

Since we are aiming for transparency, this forum post can be used to apply for a delegation from notional.

Currently, the 120,000 atoms in the vesting account from proposal 104 are delegated to:

  • various

Our delegations are absolutely an endorsement. If at any time, we feel that a validator is not performing up to our quality standard, for any reason, subject to our sole discretion, we will relegate immediately.

Crypto Crew fills out the other end of the spectrum, in that their team is in fact relatively quiet, but they are a high water mark for technical excellence, in particular when it comes to the cosmos hub. Crypto crew is one of the second batch of relayers for cosmos, and I very strongly endorse their work.

We are going to put particular emphasis on teams that either did not receive a delegation from the ICF, or received a marginal delegation from the ICF, despite technical excellence.

In addition to this, any random community member is more than welcome to come here and let us know who they think that we should delegate to, and why.

Note that any of this policy is subject to our arbitrary choices at any time for any reason and we are the ultimate deciders of who we delegate to, or if we delegate to others at all

Program Update

We’ve been very successful with this and now have a great community of validators. We haven’t quite worked out making all of the delegations yet, however, and in most cases, the amount of tokens we have isn’t really enough to move the needle for the teams that we support, so, here’s our three phase plan to address this:

  1. Assemble the crew of validators :white_check_mark:
  2. Make a system to divvy up a bag with a single tx between a group of validators
  3. Make that system support multisigs and have a nice front end.

The goal here is to highlight the participants in our delegations program to the following groups:

  • funds
  • teams
  • liquid staking protocols

In the manner that is most suited to each group, so that it is easy for other teams to leverage the curation work we are doing at Notional.

update 8/5/2023

So we have been successful and establishing the first stage of the program. I have invited one other excellent validator to apply, and after that we will go into a little bit of a stasis mode, review everybody’s contributions to the cosmos and begin delegations across the set and outreach to whales, chain teams, funds etc.

11 Likes
2

what a cosmos mindset !

1 Like
3

Hello, Jacob :wave:

On behalf of Lucky Friday, I would like to convey our interest in receiving delegations from Notional. Though we are newer members of the Bare Metal Alliance, we are running our top tier infrastructure in SOC2 compliant data centers across 6 locations in four countries (and hoping to expand in the near future). We are also in the process of earning our own SOC2 credentials, and we hope to then acquire the more stringent CCSS audits that are done specifically for blockchain infrastructure companies.

While we have only begun to get a foothold in the Cosmos ecosystem, we have gone from 1 to 4 chains in the few months since I have joined the team (we are active on Persistence One, Canto, Stride, and Quicksilver). That said, we try to avoid delta risk by having to buy tokens on the open market, instead trying to partner with chains/teams who want to run their nodes on bare metal servers and are willing to provide the allocation. Therefore, most of the chains we are operate are at the bottom of their respective lists, and it has been difficult to get our name out there without operating on larger chains in the ecosystem.

Beyond these 4 mainnets, we have also been running testnet versions of chains like Juno, Stargaze and a few others for the Game of NFTs challenge, so our experience in running Cosmos validators has grown considerably since we began. We are also formulating a plan to provide additional value to our fellow validators and Cosmos community members by hosting backup snapshots (we’re moving some nodes from older SSD machines to newer NVME servers, but we can repurpose these for other initiatives), as well as creating a website for timely updates for all validators.

If it were possible, we’d especially love delegations to the bigger projects such as Juno and Evmos, or even newer projects such as Migaloo. In the end, however, we would be grateful for any and all support for any chain. If you would like to schedule a meeting with our team, or if there is a more formal application that we must submit, please let me know and we will proceed from there.

Thank you in advance, have a wonderful weekend, and I look forward to your/Notional’s response, sir! :handshake:

Gratefully,

Ryan (aka “Phunky”), Director of Fellowship and Protocol Relations, Lucky Friday Labs :four_leaf_clover:

3 Likes
4

Thank you very much, we accept. What chains would be best for us to delegate you on?

2 Likes
5

Please excuse the delay in my reply, Jacob. I wanted to check with our engineers to get some additional information.

Before I get there, however, let me first convey our gratitude for Notional’s willingness to help. Out of the chains listed above, we would love to be running on any of them if I’m being candid. But we’re also mindful of the fact that you will likely need to split delegations among other validators, and considering we have no presence on larger, more established chains such as Juno or Evmos it would require a hefty delegation to even get us into the bottom of the active sets (much like our current dilemma). Migaloo is newer/smaller, so hopefully at least this one won’t require a large delegation to get us going.

More importantly, though, we would hope you can help us with building relationships in the ecosystem. Whether that is meeting more members of the BMA or getting to know contacts on various chains/protocols, anything you can provide will help us a great deal. And of course, we would love to reciprocate by adding value to Notional however we can. If you would like us to share contacts in the Polkadot ecosystem, we can certainly do so. We also have plans for creating some websites we believe will help all validators here in Cosmos, but these are still a work in progress as we continue to roll out our presence in the ecosystem.

In an ideal world we’d love to run Juno, Evmos, and Migaloo, but we also realize that may be too much. We have started to take down the testnets that we booted up to make an attempt at the Game of NFTs incentivized learning program, so hopefully we will replace them with live mainnet nodes before the week is out. If it would be easier for us to all hop on a call to work out the details, we can do that as well.

Thank you again for your willingness to help Lucky Friday become more active in the Cosmos ecosystem, Jacob. We appreciate Notional’s dedication to running censorship resistant bare metal infrastructure in a globally decentralized way, and we look forward to working together moving forward :raised_hands:

2 Likes
6

Greetings Jacob/Notional,

Thank you for this opportunity to introduce myself again. I am Luis Lopes (also known as Josh_Lopes), co-founder of Tedcrypto.io and representing it here for a potential delegation from Notional. We’r a cosmos validator since February 2022.

A little bit more about Tedcrypto: Ted Crypto.io - Validator Profile

My passion for blockchain validation led me to become involved with the Cosmos ecosystem. Since late 2021, I have been contributing to OOS projects such as the Helium and ScPrime projects, where I have open-sourced tools and scripts like CryptoTools and ScPrimeSettingsTool. I have also contributed to Cosmos ecosystem short after we started validating it!

We created Tedcrypto on the premise of giving back to crypto what crypto gave us during the bull market. We started validating on Bitsong and Cerberus, and very selectively we expanded. We got to validate EVMOs with the help of Frens and Orbital Apes and later NOMIC, thanks to the support of Golden Staking Ratio, tho whom we are truly grateful.

Validation wise we have different layers of monitoring from prometheus/grafana, SimplyStaking Panic and Tenderduty V2, with custom crons/scripts that ping services and run checks with HealthChecks. E.g.: we have created our own monitoring script for Nomic! (I need to create an article about it is rather easy and but works like a charm!)

We also have several platforms self-hosted like Sentry, RedMail, HealthCheck etc. Currently our nodes run between Hetzner (almost none, we migrated it all over) and OVH in different data centers for some redundancy. More recently since September last year, we have been migrating our tooling to in-site servers. We have bought 2 more servers and we are going to try run some nodes completely off-big datacenters next but we also have to be mindful of the expenses we are incurring with this change (something that a delegation from Notional could greatly help!)

Our focus is on providing value to the community through tools, smart scripts, and collaborative applications like TedLotto. The latter, sadly the other validators didn’t want to participate in, although this app was designed to benefit validators who do not have the resources to market themselves and provide an incentive for delegators to support these validators. I won’t go in much details of what TedLotto was meant to be but It has been a tremendous success for us, and we are proud of what we have achieved with it.

To not overextend this proposal, this are more contributions we did over the time:

We have also been involved in rescuing thousands of dollars worth of tokens from different ecosystems through Cosmos Guardians, a service we run solely to help people, without charging a fee (www.cosmosguardian.com).

Our contributions to the ecosystem extend beyond tools and projects; we have also created video guides and materials with James Snell (CryptoConscious), I’m leaving here the last weekly catchup: Cosmos Catchup 19: $AQUA drama, Noble, Quasar, WYND , dYdX and $SCRT progress - YouTube James did; As many others validators we also run relayers between most known projects and most chains we validate and chains we don’t validate like ATOM and Osmosis.

With that said, we were hoping to count with the support of Notional for $OSMO and $ATOM which are two projects we solemnly think we can help and promote and we are already too invested.

Thank you for considering this application, and I look forward to contributing to the growth and success of the Cosmos ecosystem and work with Notional! :rocket:

4 Likes
7

Hey, Josh!

Thanks for posting this. We (Lucky Friday) are relatively new to the Cosmos ecosystem, but I’m always happy to meet fellow validators. I’ll be sure to check out some of the links you posted to learn more about you / your team.

Best,

Ryan / Phunky

P.S. - Love how you’re giving back to the community. We’re trying to do the same by building out some websites to help all validators in the Cosmos ecosystem :handshake:

3 Likes
8

Hey everyone, sorry about the delay on taking action here – we’re going to begin making delegations as soon as the ICF has completed their delegations.

2 Likes
9

Appreciate the effort, sharing the bread is not a common thing.

1 Like
10

Since you’ve offered to apply this policy on Osmosis as well, I come to request your support to Zenith Station. We are a group of 3 crypto enthusiasts with validating on Osmosis, Evmos, Stride, Mars and Bitsong, soon Gravity Bridge. We started validating 1 year ago and have been focusing on learning and working with chains we have deep value alignment and that have a vision for the future. After this year of learning we will start expanding our services to relaying and public endpoints on all our chains.

We firmly believe in the power of blockchain to revolutionize governance and a liberate us from traditional financial institutions that block many people around the world from accesing financial opportunities. We work very hard to ensure quality and security of our validator nodes and believe that having bare metal servers under your direct control ensures that we are truly working towards decentralizing the networks we work with.

As you know, we are extremely active in governance on the chains we work with, especially Osmosis, Evmos, Gravity Bridge and Stride. We try to have direct contact with our delegators, (most of them being Osmosis and Evmos community members) to ensure we represent them and work towards helping the chains we work with to deliver their vision.

Appreciate you considering delegating to us and are open to any questions you might have either here or directly through my twitter (@luisqagt).

2 Likes
11

Louis, thank you so much for your submission. I apologize, because we are doing our next round of delegations only when the foundation has completed theirs. I know you’re asking about osmosis, but we’re actually going to synchronize all of our delegations. Your support on tooling has been really great for our organization and I think many others, so as soon as that is complete I will contact you and we will get rolling.

Unfortunately I have to say the same thing to everybody. Delegations will kick off as soon as the ICF has completed theirs. This is necessary because we need to figure out where we stand. Also if theirs are not completed within one week, please fear not: we will delegate anyway.

1 Like
12

Thank you sir. There is no rush, happy to chase this after ICF.

Just in time to showcase another big win for osmosis done by us and IcyCro team – we work together on Cosmos Guardians

image
image1388×1544 85.3 KB

:saluting_face:

1 Like
13

Hey everyone, I just wanted to let people know that for at least the next week, we will be making no changes to delegations on the cosmos hub.

Applications for delegations should be put on this forum, and not sent by DM. Myself and Ruslan from our team just did a full review and for the time being we see no need to make delegation changes on the hub.

I also realized that it would make sense to do a call with (all at once) applicants. @LitBit will post scheduling information.

14

Greetings to the Notional team. LOA Labs would appreciate your consideration for delegation. Here is more about LOA Labs Validator:

  1. We are a small, indy validator team focused on good governance, impact use cases of web3 tools, have been in the Cosmos community for several years.
  2. We have developed an open source tool targeted toward other small, indy validators called the LOA Node Toolkit designed to support active governance monitoring/voting, node uptime monitoring, rewads and distribution service - and we continue to iterate on this tool.
  3. We have strong connections in the community as a validator for Juno, Regen, Gravity, Kyve, Quicksliver, Gravity Bridge, Althea, and ixo.
  4. We are strong advocates for good governance with historical experience in good community process/dialogue as well as web2 political processes. We have started some community dialogue around good decentralized governance principles.
  5. We are a relayer node operator for multiple chains
  6. We have outlined our aims on how we hope to serve each chain that we validate for pending resource availability and needs of each chain.

I’m happy to answer any questions you have or you can dip into our github - @loa-labs on github (sorry - this forum doesn’t allow hyperlinks)

-Dave, LOA Labs

2 Likes
15

thank you! It will allow some links after you make additional posts :slight_smile:

2 Likes
16

Firstly, we at Cosmos Spaces would like to express our appreciation for your transparent approach and commitment to supporting smaller, yet dedicated validators in the Cosmos ecosystem. Your efforts to uplift and empower these validators align with our own values, and we believe that a strong and diverse validator community is essential for the continued growth and success of the Cosmos hub and the larger ecosystem.

We would like to make the case for Cosmos Spaces as a potential recipient of a delegations from Notional. We can honestly say we wouldn’t be here without the support you’ve given us as we’ve entered our journey as validators. We are a testimony to how when a good team has the right support, they can beat the odds and even inspire others to do the same. Our team at Cosmos Spaces is a community-focused operation that actively participates as a validator, relayer, and RPC provider. Over the last year, we have held countless calls on Twitter Spaces to bring together projects in the Cosmos ecosystem with community members and talk about pressing topics in the ecosystem. We’ve provided onboarding support, education, and fostered community engagement, all while maintaining a focus on fun and inclusivity. We are not coders, YET, but we try to add value to the community where we can and are always looking to improve.

As a smaller operator, we strive to provide quality infrastructure while scaling efficiently. We run our services on both Bare Metal, as well as hosted servers by our team, no white labels for anything we do. Currently, we operate at a loss for most chains we validate for, and despite receiving only two foundation delegations, we continue to provide strong relayer services to support the crucial IBC transactions that makes the Cosmos vision a reality. Our commitment to the Cosmos ecosystem is evident through our validator participation in various chains, including Juno, Osmosis, Quicksilver, Comdex, Evmos, Nomic, Migaloo, Omniflix, Stargaze, and hopefully soon on the Cosmos Hub with our recent foundation delegation. Furthermore, we offer relayer services for all the mentioned blockchains and additional ones like Stride, Axelar, Kujira, and Mars. We also provide RPC services for the Cosmos Hub and Evmos. We are actively working to expand all of these services across the ecosystem.

When it comes to governance, we take pride in being good stewards of the community and always strive to make the best decisions for the future of the ecosystem. Governance is hard, but as long as we all focus on our common goal of progressing the cosmos ecosystem forward things work themselves out in the end. We have even held open discussions on twitter spaces, some of which you have participated in as well, to make sure there’s a chance for discussion and for the community to gain better understanding of situations.

We believe that a delegation from Notional would empower us to continue our mission of providing quality infrastructure services and fostering community support within the Cosmos ecosystem. Your support would enable us to expand our offerings and serve as a testament to our commitment to the community and the Cosmos ecosystem as a whole.

We sincerely hope that you will consider Cosmos Spaces as a worthy recipient of your delegation. Together, we can strengthen the Cosmos ecosystem and create a brighter future for all involved.

Thank you for everything you do for the ecosystem, and for your consideration.

Warm regards,
The Cosmos Spaces Team

2 Likes
17

we’ll be delegating to cosmos spaces asap, hopefully in the next 24h. Thanks for making the post here!

We’ll reach out to see which chains we can be most impactful and synergistic on with you.

cosmos guardians is a wonderful contribution to the whole community. thank you.

We’ll be reaching out right after this message, to all four of you!

You’re also in cohort 2!

Phase 0 - random delegations to bare metal hoies for about 1.5 years
Phase 1 - somewhat more structured delegations to bare metal homies and strategically important validators like @DonCryptonium
Phase 2 - refined but still informal delegations program, specializing in bare metal and media
Phase 3 - @DonCryptonium, Cryptocrew, @Phunky, @Luis_Quezada, @Tricky & cosmos spaces

thanks so much for applying. As participants in phase 3, you’ll get:

If there’s anything else that we can help you do to grow your business or learn, please let us know. And thank you.

18

Thank you so much for this. In an effort to help around the ecosystem more, we’ve decided to merge with Interbloc team. Interbloc is currently composed of coldy and Felix, this will strengthen our developer focused services and our infrastructure. Furthermore, we will also be able to work on more chains that Zenith is not currently a part off like Juno.

With the above in mind, I would then like to request that the delegation be made to coldy validator on Osmosis (osmovaloper15004ysvmqnqzkvt7x6s4cd53flmmvgfv6t4y9y) and Juno (junovaloper15004ysvmqnqzkvt7x6s4cd53flmmvgfvpgmrc5) if possible, which will be renamed to Interbloc in the coming days.

1 Like
19

Sounds good to me

I think that you have chosen well in terms of partners

20

Hello Jacob/Notional team,

This is Architect from Architect Nodes and formally applying for delegation. I applaud your efforts to encourage independent validators, helping decentralization and securing the network.

I am listing details of our setup and services we offer below:

  • Validating on 9 chains - EVMOS, Juno, Persistence, Stride, Fetch.AI, Bitsong, Gravity Bridge, Comdex, Band
  • BM validator in self custody, also use BM servers in datacenter backed by remote signer with Yubi HSM in my custody
  • Relaying across the interchain
  • Public API/RPC endpoints registered in Cosmos directory
  • Supporting testnet for multiple chains
  • Self funded with skin in the game
  • We support other validators with delegation who are contributing in Cosmos. Not as big as Notional delegation but doing what we can where we have means.
  • Available on Twitter, Discord and Reddit

I would like to seek delegation for Cosmos Hub and Juno. We applied for Juno FDP, if that comes through then i will withdraw my ask for Juno. Hardest one is Cosmos Hub, we want to be part of Cosmos validator set but entry barrier is just way out of our reach. Plus, we can’t even ask for community delegation since we don’t know when we will be in active set, can’t let people lose rewards.

So that’s it. This is an amazing initiative and kudos to notional team for finding ways to help cosmos.

Cheers
Architect