It has been more than a year since I published information about how we build and operate our Tendermint validator nodes. Much has changed since then, so I figured an update was overdue. — One significant change is that our validators have moved from using single local signers to using a threshold signing cluster. More about that later. Another difference is that one of our favorite data center providers (Heztner) announced a zero-tolerance policy for cryptocurrency-related hosting. You can rest assured that Block Pane…

This article is a journey from the view of a validator through the April 5th halt of the Juno network. I review some of the findings uncovered along the way and the process of reviewing the attack. It does not cover the story of recovering the chain. [ block pane…

I’m thrilled to announce that the Osmosis Grants Program has approved our proposal for a re-write of Tenderduty. We have opted to defer any payment on the grant until the project is 100% complete. If we don’t deliver, we don’t get paid. …

With less than 24 hours to go, the vote on Juno network’s Prop 16 has been a crucible for all validators. At this point, it does seem that the proposal will succeed, and what happens next will be very interesting. What is Prop 16? For those unaware, Juno’s proposition 16 proposes seizing tokens worth…

To many the role of a validator seems arcane and shrouded in mystery. We aren’t magicians and the work itself isn’t particularly complicated. Running a validator is quite simple but running a validator node with high availability can be complex. The primary job of a validator is to participate in…

Osmosis uses a custom Cosmos-SDK module, ‘epoch’, which triggers once a day at roughly 17:15 UTC. The purpose of this module is to payout rewards for LP providers and staking. It is very compute-intensive and has been taking 16–18 minutes the last few days. During this period the chain is…

Every day, in some telegram/discord/[insert service here] validator chat, someone asks the question: how do I become a validator? We also hear the laments that the big validators only continue to get more votes, while the little guys can’t seem to win. For the latter, there is often a good…

What happens behind the scenes when Block Pane joins a Cosmos/Tendermint chain as a validator? How many nodes, what configuration, and why should someone choose to delegate to us? Nodes When building a validator, it isn’t just one node or location. It takes a balancing act to keep costs reasonable but…

Here’s what Block Pane has been up to lately: We’ve survived roughly two months in the Kusama “Thousand Node Validator” program and have done quite well with a score of 30 and a 42% inclusion rate (very high!) in the last 84 eras. We are frequently an “A” rated validator…