Six years in Cosmos. What we've built, where we stand, and an honest ask

Conversation Validation
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Hey everyone,

I’ve been putting off writing this for a while. Not because I didn’t know what to say,
but because it’s easier to keep building quietly than to admit out loud that quiet building
isn’t enough anymore. No one likes to admit they are wrong. Well this is the time to do so - I am.

My name is Serj. Some of you know me as @serejandmyself. Some of you have listened to
the podcast. Some of you used an RPC endpoint we run without ever knowing it was us.
I’ve been part of this ecosystem since 2019. Not as an investor, not as a speculator,
but as someone who genuinely cares about what’s being built here and wanted to help
document it before the world was paying attention.

Let me tell you the actual story, because I think it matters for what I’m about to ask.

Where it started

Before the Citizen Web3 podcast had a single listener, I was doing biz dev for a project called
Cyber (Bostrom). Apart from the very first community pool spend on another project (before DeFi summer kicked in), one of the things I was doing was helping Adriana run “Today in Cosmos”. A Twitter campaign that helped seed the first real Cosmos community online. I was translating, posting, amplifying. Small things. But that’s how you fall in love with an ecosystem, you do the (un)glamorous work before it becomes cool.

In April 2020, I noticed something: there was no Cosmos ecosystem podcast. Nobody was sitting down with the people building this thing and asking them why. So I started one.

That podcast is now 188 episodes old. It’s still the only one that has covered Cosmos from the very beginning. I’ve spoken to Ethan Buchman, Jae Kwon, Jack Zampolin three times, Billy Rennekamp, Zarko Milosevic twice, Gavin Birch, Tess Rinearson, Peng Zhong, Chjango Unchained, Sunny, P2P, Stake Fish, Cryptocito, Coney Daddy, Denis Fadeev, Barry Plunkett, Project founders, validators, and many, many more.

I ran Cosmos po Russki, online events for the Russian-speaking community. I helped run numerous TG groups back in the day. I organised HackAtom RU, the 5th official Cosmos Hackaton. I hosted Spaces on Atom 2.0, Game of Chains, Interchain Security, CosmWasm, Liquid Staking. I wrote guides.

I say all of this not to boast… But because I want you to understand that when I became a validator in 2021, it wasn’t to extract value from this ecosystem. It was because I’d been giving to it and I wanted to be part of its infrastructure, not just its media.

What we built

Once I committed to the validator path, we went deep. Not just “run a node and collect
commissions.” We built things.

We run full public archive endpoints for every Cosmos Hub chain version —
cosmoshub-1, 2, 3, and 4. The genesis. The entire history of this network,
free and queryable by anyone:

I honestly don’t know how many others maintain all four on their own servers for free. If you do, I’d genuinely love to know. We should probably be talking.

We built a chain data indexer from scratch. Not forked, not copied. It’s running in production. Public OpenAPI 3.1 docs are at indexer.cosmoshub-4.citizenweb3.com/docs (contact us on Telegram @citizenweb3citizenweb3 for API access).

We run active IBC relayers to Osmosis, Neutron, Stride, Gravity-Bridge, Bostrom, and Namada.

We built ValidatorInfo, a validator and network explorer that isn’t just another block scanner. It has skip:go token swap integrated (run by Cosmos Labs), a staking RAG where you can actually ask questions and get answers grounded in live chain data (unique in the industry as far as I know), P2P chat, and a decentralised forum.

All of this runs on bare-metal servers we own. Physical iron, in the Atlantic, off-grid capable. No AWS. No Google Cloud. No middleman who can pull the plug. Horcrux. Restake. Monthly electricity bills, not a cloud invoice.

Where things stand now

Here’s the honest part. And feel free to throw the tomatoes, but at this stage we will take them for food if needed =)

We built a lot. We marketed very little. And the validator landscape has quietly shifted over the years toward operators with better marketing, not better infrastructure. Cloud validators dominate the top of delegation boards. Independent, self-hosted operators, the ones who actually embody what decentralisation means in practice are slowly disappearing.

We’ve lost delegations over the years one by one. Some to natural churn. Some to chains that changed policies in ways that disadvantaged smaller validators. Some just to the silence that comes from not shouting loud enough.

I’m still here. The infrastructure is still running. The team is small: a part-time devops, a developer, a designer. And let me tell you, they’ve been patient with a situation that asks a lot of patience. If i were religious, i’d honestly be preaying to those people. I won’t pretend the economics are comfortable, because they’re not. But I’m not writing this to ask for sympathy.

I’m writing this because I want to make a direct case: what we run has value for this ecosystem, we’re asking for delegations to keep it running, and I’d rather say that clearly than keep hoping someone notices.

Why it matters to governance

This community votes on decentralisation. I still believe it. You’ve passed proposals about validator
diversity. You’ve discussed the risk of cloud concentration.

If that matters to you in governance it should matter in your staking decisions too. Delegating to a self-hosted, independent, bare-metal validator who has been here since the beginning and maintains public infrastructure for the whole ecosystem is one of the most direct expressions of those values.

Does communication matter? Maybe we have not been the angel people were expecting, but as far as i know, even with my personal struggles, my forum account is still top 7 users on the forum for all time. I think thats dedication, even in the rough times over the last 2 years (debts, babies, etc - yes, life happens, but we still try to commit).

Not charity. Alignment.

Cashback programme: just launched

We recently launched cashback for delegators. Automatic. No forms, no claiming.
We send it to you in the first days of each month.

  • 5% monthly cashback - redelegate to us from any other validator, hold 1+ month
  • 2% monthly cashback - stake with us for 1+ month

First snapshot already taken (April 30). Next payout coming in the first days of June.

The ask

Delegate ATOM to Citizen Web3.

If you’ve ever used our archive nodes, queried the indexer, or listened to an episode or you just care… This is how you keep it running.

And if you have questions about the setup, the infrastructure, the indexer, the explorer, or anything else, ask here. I’ll answer everything.

Thank you for reading,
Serj (@serejandmyself)

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Appreciate all that you do. We offer a 5% rebate too and work hard to develop our marketing muscle. We run self-owned bare metal, like you guys do and also believe it’s important for ecosystems to diversify away from cloud providers, Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Hetzner, OVH.

My only ask for your consideration is to contemplate changing your promo from redelegating from any validator to redelegating from top 50 validators or top 75 validators. If decentralization is the theme, then it can be argued that the redelegations need to come from the top down.

All the best and with respect.

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Makes a lot of sense actually. Thank you for that comment. I guess in our case its anything outside top 125 haha. Seriously though - overlooked this somehow

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