UnitedBloc
“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. This eloquent and often used misquote of Aristotle is easily understood to mean teamwork produces more value than individuals working alone. This truth resonates with the Moonbeam collator community and motivates us to intentionally collaborate in pursuit of greater community value. This bloc of collators, banding together and united in our objective to bring value to our community has formed a collective identity called “UnitedBloc”.
Our charter is to provide community value to the Moonbeam, Moonriver, and Moonbase Alpha parachains by leveraging the collective power of a group. We will maintain the following community contributions and hold ourselves to a high level of collator performance.
UnitedBloc Contributions
Moonbase Alpha
UnitedBloc members maintain Moonbase nodes and are active members of the testnet. (Every blockchain needs a performant and functional testnet. Every UnitedBloc member volunteers in Moonbase Alpha operating a collator, an RPC node, or both.)
Community and Collator Tools
UnitedBloc members provide informational websites, database snapshots, security recommendations, monitoring tools, geodns, regional load balancing, and other services that are useful to the Moonbeam ecosystem.
Public and Globally Service Balanced RPC
UnitedBloc members provide RPC nodes which are publicly accessible and globally service balanced. UnitedBloc provides 8 bare metal servers distributed globally. The entire set is accessible at:
For Moonbase:
https://moonbase.unitedbloc.com
wss://moonbase.unitedbloc.com
For Moonriver:
https://moonriver.unitedbloc.com
wss://moonriver.unitedbloc.com
For Moonbeam:
https://moonbeam.unitedbloc.com
wss://moonbeam.unitedbloc.com
Note, these systems are globally service balanced via GeoDNS, and regionally load balanced via NGINX. (Each regional pod runs on bare metal, NVME, and provides RPC for all 3 chains. This model allows for incorporating supplemental resources behind each load balancer as demand increases.)
Community Engagement
Coalition members are active in the Discord providing assistance and engagement in the channels as needed to promote and develop the user community. (This is a significant value! The vibrant, friendly, and informative social space of Moonbeam/Moonriver today is due in large part to the efforts of the community collators to maintain a high degree of engagement.)
Continuous Improvement
UnitedBloc strives to adapt and evolve to the ever changing needs of Moonbeam. The ecosystem is not stagnant, and thus when we stand still, we are really moving backwards. Because of this we continue to improve on what we provide and look for new ways to add value, and hold all members responsible for contributing to the group.
UnitedBloc Performance
Maintenance
“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together”. (Vincent Van Gogh)
UnitedBloc members recognize that attention to small details is key to our success and accordingly are among the most attentive and responsive to Foundation requests for information or upgrades. UnitedBloc members are committed to never missing a maintenance item. This is a significant value as we have recently seen other collators miss critical changes and upgrades leading to poor or non-existent block production until the issue is resolved.
Uptime
“All for one and one for all” (Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas)
UnitedBloc members participate in collective monitoring — we will NOT have a collator in failed state for days. Our communications within the coalition ensure awareness and response. You won’t hear from us “oops! We were down for days and didn’t know it because our telemetry failed.”
Response
“Do it right, or don’t do it at all.” (Ray Charles, quoting his mother)
UnitedBloc members are “doing it right”. Accepting a collator role on a parachain is a commitment to the blockchain and our delegators. This is NOT a “set it and forget it” situation! Security vulnerabilities do occur and malicious actors do strike. Bugs happen. Performance issues happen.
Whatever the emergency, UnitedBloc is prepared. We maintain a private contact list to ensure 24x7 contact with all UnitedBloc collators. How “quick” is that security update going to be if there is no way to contact the collators? If all we can do is post in the Discord and wait for participants to get the message? UnitedBloc solves that problem.
This is a HUGE value as it addresses one of the biggest weaknesses of a permissionless system. Anonymity is wonderful until there is an emergency where the collective good would benefit from some organized communications and assurance of contact.
Please bring your questions, comments, and suggestions to the UnitedBloc telegram group.
UnitedBloc Members
Blockshard 🇨🇭
BloClick 🇪🇸
BrightlyStake 🇮🇳
CertHum 🇺🇸
GPValidator 🇵🇹
Hetavalidation 🇦🇺
Legend 🇦🇪
PathrockNetwork 🇩🇪
Polkadotters 🇨🇿
SIK | crifferent.de 🇩🇪
StakeBaby 🇬🇷
StakeSquid 🇬🇪
TrueStaking 🇺🇸
