Cosmos Validators Brief #11: bitfish

bitfish

Welp! In the matter of nearly 1 month, with this bitfish Brief I’ve sort of circled back to where it all began.

For those not in the know. bitfish was owner of the Game of Stakes Validator called out by my multiple Validators just over 1 month ago for having had 70 or so Validator submissions in the Game of Stakes contest. And consequently all of these bitfish-run accounts were all forked out of the contest by the Validator community.

I reached out to bitfish last week via emailing them on their website, asking if they’d do a Brief. I honestly didn’t think they would be willing, due to wanting to keep everything about them cloaked in secrecy still, BUT they did and the result is they allow the Cosmos community to see a little bit ‘behind the curtain’, so to speak.

Big question to ponder:

The biggest challenge for Cosmos will be for the community to agree on rules for governance. […]

What is the threshold where we ring the alarms on some of these big whales? How should we react as a community in response to this situation?

The following was sent to me from Ricard Garcia:

Tell me a bit about yourselves — as much/ little as you all would like to share.

Hello, we are bitfish! You probably know us from our participation in the Game of Stakes (GoS) and our final message to the community as we signed off from GoS. Our headquarter is in Bangkok, Thailand with another major office in Seoul, Korea. Our dev team members have extensive experience operating and developing secure infrastructure. We plan to bring this knowledge base and expertise to setting up validators for Proof-of-Stake based blockchains. We want to be a trusted validator for PoS blockchains.

We also strongly believe in community building and have hosted multiple meetups in both our offices in Bangkok and Seoul. In fact, we had the Cosmos team and teams building on Cosmos in both of the meetups (#1, #2) we have hosted.

Outside of Cosmos/Tendermint, how have you been involved with blockchain so far? What projects have you participated in? What projects do you find particularly intriguing?

bitfish was selected as one of the first external validators for Loom Network. We also operate an EOS Block Producer candidate, eos.fish. We are exploring adding support for other promising blockchains as well.

How did you get into blockchain space initially and what keeps you interested?

Each bitfish team member has his or her own stories for joining the blockchain space. We all agree however that decentralization will be key. We want to be part of the effort to paving the way to a more decentralized world.

Where do you see the blockchain space evolving in the next 1–3 years?

The blockchain space will be in building mode for the next few years. Projects will be more responsible in the way they raise funds and the way they manage their treasury. Teams will focus on delivering than marketing their vision. Narrowing the gap between what’s promised and what’s real will be a key theme for the next 1–3 years.

With regards to Cosmos, what do you think will be the biggest challenges faced by the project overall?

The biggest challenge for Cosmos will be for the community to agree on rules for governance. We wanted to hit on this point through our response to Certus One’s blog post on our “cartel”. It’s entirely possible that a small number of whales take majority control of a network. What is the threshold where we ring the alarms on some of these big whales? How should we react as a community in response to this situation?

With regards to being a validator in Cosmos, what do you think will be the biggest challenges you will face?

Trying to stay on top of the validator 24/7 will undoubtedly be the most challenging part of being a validator in Cosmos. Some of our team members had little sleep during the Game of Stakes. We expect a similar level of workload for the mainnet. Fortunately, our team members are well distributed around the globe, so we have all of the time zones covered.

You can find bitfish at their website: https://bit.fish/

And on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bitfishlabs