Journey of a Startup Validator

KysenPool launched into the Top 100 Cosmos Validators within 4 weeks. Our backstory…

Published in

KysenPool

3 min readAug 6, 2019

From the time KysenPool’s core team committed to rollout a Cosmos Validator, we went from decision to the Top 100 Validators within 4 weeks! Here’s our backstory on how we did it.

Take a Trip into KysenPool

A quick background on KysenPool, describing the path we took, why we chose what we did and where we are today.

KysenPool began as a Cosmos Validator and it has been quite a journey since then! As we began forming the team, we weren’t one of those that bought the Cosmos ATOM pre-sale in April 2017, where a lot of those that did would’ve rode the 40x valuation jump from its pre-sale pricing to its release in the Binance exchange in the April 2019.

Startup Mode

We are a startup hustled into standing up solid base for a Cosmos node operation, slowly becoming one of the Top 100 Validators as an active validator. We now began participating in governance votes*, propagate interesting Cosmos-related news via social media outreach on Twitter, writing guides to help newbies on-board with Cosmos staking, and helping other newcomers in chat groups.

*Note: Votes on governance proposals are optional at this time, without slashing penalties for non-voters. Even that’s the case, we still went ahead to have a policy to keep an eye out about governance proposals, put our votes in and trying really hard to get the word out each and every time

We take our work as a Cosmos Network validator seriously. Our setup included the Yubico Hardware Security Module YubiHSM2. The validator key was generated and duped in this Pine64 board running Ubuntu while it was air gapped! We then transported the keys to then plug into physical hardware servers in Tier-3 data centers that’s behind private cages. It was a lot of fun!

Direction

There are other Validators out there with a much deeper and complex set of key management solution supposedly more resilient, flexible and secure than our setup, but we believe we’re at a good position and will be contributing in other ways around instrumentation, block exploration and operational automations.

Partnerships and Team

KysenPool is in a rather unique position with some partnerships with Silicon Valley-based hosting services, paired with another partnership with a public cloud provider. These partnerships enable KysenPool to hunker down at a very low operational costs that we can afford to pull off a formidable setup without costing us a high burn rate.

We aren’t compromising on engineering practices either; both on hardware setup on-premises or on the public cloud. It’s operated by co-founders and engineer staff members with backgrounds in Web scaling, Cloud architecture, Legal and Real Estate (running a staking-as-a-service provider is quite like a real estate endeavor!)

Blockchain Networks

The team firmly believes in the Cosmos ecosystem and is heavily invested in making this work, for Cosmos Hub and Cosmos SDK’s future. Its also heavily investing into several other Proof-of-Stake chains that’s underway, including Kava Labs, Polkadot, Kusama, Solana, Algorand, Cardano.

KysenPool is live with Harmony and will be participating in their Pangaea discovery/competitive/hackfest TestNet in the next couple of months.

What’s Next?

Our goal is to establish a long term sustainable Staking-as-a-Service platform. Thank you for your trust in us to provide a sound Staking presence with a solid business plan and the ability to move quickly.

Check us out at 🌐 KysenPool.io