Validator Services

On this page you will find all the details about the performance, configuration and security of our validators.

Validator wallets informations

General

Below are the details of our wallets for the polkadot validator :

We use a proxy, allowing us to perform all kinds of actions except token transfers. This allows us to participate in votes in the Democracy section.

If you want to know more about proxies : see the Polkadot wiki.

Commission

We have chosen to offer 1% commission on our validator.

Why not less ?

We want to get a minimum of DOT to be able to pay our server and increase our self stake.

Why not more ?

We want our validator to be the most profitable for everyone.

Validator performances

Node performance on chain

We have a A+ grade. Blue lines are when we switch or upgrade our nodes. Source : One-T by turboflakes.

Also, from the last 32 Eras we are 4th compare to all TVP members in terms of performances :

Rewards generated (payout)

Source : SubTV Polkadot Bot on Telegram.

We are 100% active since December 2023.

Hardware

I chose to rent 2 dedicated servers from Worldstream.

• CPU : Intel Xeon E-2236
• RAM : 32GB ECC DDR4 RAM
• Disk : 2x 500GB NVMe SSD
• Bandwith : 1Gbit/s - 100TB

If another cloud provider was temporary needed for maintenance, it will be announced on X (Twitter).

Validator nodes configuration and security

Most validators host their servers at Google, AWS, OVH, Hertzner.

If a major problem occurs with one of these, you can be sure that one or more validators will be down.

The validators in question as well as their nominators are at high risk of being slashed (loss of tokens)

We therefore made the choice to go to Worldstream for more decentralization. But risk 0 does not exist.

Also, if you look at PolkWatch / Network you can see that we are the only validator at Worldstream.

Strategy to avoid unresponsiveness and equivocation

We only use two servers without redundancy. We made this choice because the risk of double signing and slashing is very high with HA nodes.

Also, slashing penalties for being offline is much less than those for equivocation.

Source : Polkadot wiki - Secure Validator - Conclusions

Process to upgrade a validator node

If we need to switch servers (for reasons of decentralization for example) here is how we proceed :

• Update by email : we have configured our Github account so that as soon as an update is published, we receive an email.
• We are waiting for feedback on other validators.
• Server A is the oldest and B the new server.
• Upgrade of the new server B. Restart of the polkadot service with telemetry and logs check.
• Generation of a new session key on server B and update on the blockchain (this step allows us to link our server B to our wallet)
• Running servers A and B for 12 hours.
• Verifications : we check if on our prometheus with Grafana if the server is active or not. We also check if blocks have been created in the program logs on server A and B.
• If everything is good, we upgrade server A

We perform these tasks manually. We have already done this task several times.

As Member of the TVP, we must update the Polkadot program within 24 to 48 hours after the update is published on Github.

Security of the validator node

Firewall

• 22 / TCP : SSH connection
• 30333 / TCP : P2P Polkadot / Kusama

Server access

We access the server only via generated ssh key witch are password protected.

It is not possible to connect to the validator without the proper ssh key (root access by ssh disabled)

We naturally maintain a backup of private + public ssh keys.

Monitoring

We use different tools :

• Monitoring : Prometheus
• Visualization : Grafana
• Alerting: Alertmanager with email alerts
• Polkadot : Telemetry + Polkadot prometheus metrics
• Telegram bot based on telemetry : SubTV + Web3 Alerts
• Cloud provider : Ping monitoring

Database backup

We use it from community backups like Polkachu.

We have already performed the operation may times.

Why choose GTSTAKING on Polkadot ?

Our stable commission

As long as we support our validator, we will not change our commission.

If one day the token holders choose to set up a minimum % commission and it’s more than 1% (as on Kusama) we pledge to be at the minimum of what will be possible.

Own payout system

With us, your rewards are directly received, and therefore staked if you have configured your wallet in this way.

We are committed to triggering the payout after each era.

For this, we use the program which runs every day on a virtual machine.

Zero downtime upgrade

Upgrade a node which is 100% active with para-validation, and restart the node is very dangerous. Imagine if a bug or if the database if corrupted after a restart ?

The validator node will be offline for a moment.

So instead we rent 2 servers. As you can read in the upgrade section, we test the new version and generate a new session key on the new server.

About me

Who am I ?

Based in France, I work in cloud web hosting company and also manage Kusama as well as Polkadot validation nodes.

Why am I doing this ?

Since the beginning of Ethereum, I always wanted to manage one or more nodes, but nothing concrete.

Here with the TVP program, I had the opportunity to be helped by Parity and Web3F for nominations since July 2022.

What is my goal ?

My goal is to have one or more nodes active in set 100% of the time while participating in the decentralization of the network.

I also want to be a recognized, reliable and fair validator.