Silk Nodes - Validator Profile

[SilkNodes]

Hello there Cosmonauts,

Let us introduce ourselves….

We are Silk Nodes and you can find us here:

• Twitter
• Discord
• Website
• All other links

About Silk Nodes

1. Can you tell us a little bit about your validator – who are you and what makes you stand out from the others?

Here at Silk Nodes, our focus is primarily on building and operating secure infrastructure for blockchains and other decentralized networks to support and push forward those projects and chains, thus accelerating the adoption of decentralized technology.

We run our highly secure and reliable nodes for PoS protocols on enterprise-level hardware to ensure maximum security and efficiency

Also, along with our secure nodes we also additionally go the extra step and support a number of IBC enabled chains by running our Interchain relayers - by relaying IBC packets we are also contributing and ensuring the liveness of the Interchain network

2. How long has your validator been active on the Cosmos Hub?

Silk Nodes has been active on the Cosmos Hub since June 2022 but our team members are long-term true cosmonauts.

Silk Nodes first validator set was to support the Cosmos Hub as we believe it to be the #1 Proof of Stake blockchain

The Cosmos Hub is an Internet of Blockchains (a network of blockchains able to communicate with each other in a decentralized way) a network that requires a high-end node setup and a blockchain that matches our ethos here at Silk Nodes, and one we are delighted to support!

3. How do you engage with your delegators?

Our most active discussions and communications is via our Twitter account @silk_nodes

Our Discord server we will deep dive more on each of the dedicated channels for a more formal communication on a range of discussions - along with our community support channels

On our website you will find supporting literature, detailed ‘How-to videos and links to our nodes, and networks

Our aim and goal here at Silk Nodes is to constantly stay communicating and engaged with our delegators - so to promote a more inclusive atmosphere where we have clear lines of communication and connection- so we are all aligned in our vision for how best to keep the Cosmos Hub evolving and secure

4. How do you make governance decisions? What is your process for deciding how to vote on proposals, and how do you ensure that you keep delegators’ best interests in mind?

As a fully independent company, we have no external influences when it comes to governance participation.

We put an extremely high responsibility value on our delegator’s votes, and ALL views are considered when casting our validator vote(s)

5. How do you share your voting choices, and the thought process behind them, with your delegators?

Every week, we will share our governance participation decision(s) and the reasons why on our Twitter page, and invite further discussions on our Discord server channels

6. What are your hopes and goals for the Cosmos Hub?

We truly believe that the Cosmos Hub is now established as the router for all IBC enabled chains

This year alone has seen a massive increase in IBC enabled chains and with the imminent release of Interchain (shared) Security, we feel that the Cosmos Hub is at the cutting edge of a truly decentralized, governance lead validator set which will be even more easily accessible to new chains and projects than it already is today.

Here at Silk Nodes, we are extremely excited to be available to provide an easy on-ramp for these new projects to build on Cosmos by providing not only a secure, reliable validator infrastructure along with our Interchain relayers but also an inclusive engaging environment for our delegators

7. How can I delegate my ATOM to Silk Nodes?

We are greatly appreciative of your delegation

You can delegate to us here at the current commission rate of 1%

[SilkNodes]

We hear there’s a bare metal group @jacobgadikian - here’s what we are starting out with, growing our bare metal stack.

Best Server Specs reserved for our Validators:
2 x E5-2680V4 CPU
Total of 56 CPU threads running at 3.30 GHz max.

196 GB of ECC DDR4 Ram with a max capacity of 1.5 TB

SSD in raid configured for best IO performance.

Redundant Power Supplies, and hot-swappable if there is a power supply failure.

We are planning for big things for the cosmos ecosystem, and being able to pack a lot of hardware in a small amount of space to keep data center costs low…

We arrive at the data center with big plans, lots of hard drives

Now we have hardware for monitoring, snapshots, and backups, with an array of different hardware to support the infrastructure we plan to build. We keep on building and adding to our stack

[SilkNodes]

Recently we performed an upgrade to take our offerings to the next level and would like to share what we’ve learned and details about our upgrade.

Our constraints are budget and space.

With this upgrade, our goal was to containerize our validators, and secure them to minimize any possibilities of breakouts if there ever is a breach, add high availability with horcrux for our validators, and use caddy to provide HA api/rpc/grpc services for the chains we are active on to help with the network.

HDD Upgrade:
The 870 QVO drives that we started out with where great until they weren’t. We where started off using these drives, but we found the performance degraded significantly over time, and looking at this graph below you can see that the benchmarks show exactly what we where experiencing.

So we went and tested with different hardware that would work for our stack. We learned that we need hard drives that can sustain a beating 24/7 and not buckle under the pressure of constant random read/writes. This is pretty easy when you have a big budget or a lot of space in a datacenter. For us, we needed to find a way to upgrade our hard drives with a smaller budget, and stay within a quarter rack size to keep costs low. We did some testing and found that the 12G SAS SSD’s was our ticket for the performance at the right cost.

After some testing, we decided the results were significantly better, and also redundancy with this configuration:

1. A high-end raid controller with a 4Gb Flash-Backed Write Cache (FBWC) configured in a stripe and mirror configuration (RAID 50) with 64k block size.
2. SSD SAS 12Gbps Hard Drive.
   
   

This was game-changing, as it has been stable and running smooth, and to prepare for growth we added another server into the mix.

With this upgrade, we were able to smash our goal. We migrated our validators to our new infrastructure, much more organized, and we sleep much better at night.

In total, we are able to run 45 nodes (Or more) on this stack and our max utilization now has a very nice buffer.

Here are some iops and disk latency test results for your viewing pleasure:
NOTE: These tests were ran with 8 nodes validating on the array, and not a single block was missed during the test.

fio --randrepeat=1 --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --gtod_reduce=1 --name=fiotest --filename=testfio --bs=4k --iodepth=64 --size=8G --readwrite=randrw --rwmixread=75

ioping -c 100 .

[Volodymyr_Boiko]

May I know how is it possible that from kepler staking my Atom was redelegated without my confirmation and now I don’t see it in my dashboard?
Source Validator Address:cosmosvaloper1jst8q8flpn94u9uvkpae8mrkk3a5pjhxx529z2(Node Guardians)Destination Validator Address:cosmosvaloper1aewyh4gtvayx6v7w592jdfylawk4rsu9tfvfgm(Silk Nodes)

[SilkNodes]

We get asked this quite a lot so i’m going to assume that you have decided to liquid stake your Atom on Stride, the way the Liquid Staking Module (LSM) works is if your current validator does not self bond then they do not qualify for LSM delegations so Stride will automatically delegate those funds to Silk Nodes temporarily because we have the most Atom self bonded, the delegation then gets split between all 32 of Strides chosen validators.

You should see your funds when you log back into stride.

[Volodymyr_Boiko]

Sorry, but i was never registered in Stride and never worked with them. Only Atom coins were transferred and from 2 different validators. Thats really wierd

ср, 10 апр. 2024 г. в 01:21, SilkNodes via Cosmos Hub Forum <notifications@cosmos1.discoursemail.com>:

[SilkNodes]

If you did not liquid stake your assets yourself then it looks like your wallet may unfortunately be compromised.

Unfortunately this is becoming are more common approach from hackers/scammers that they can liquid stake your Atom to get around the 21days unbonding.

[Volodymyr_Boiko]

It was 12 days ago. But I checked stride, there is nothing already. I thought that if it was sent ftom my wallet it supposed to be back also back after staking, but nope