Recap of the Vitwit AMA with Matic Network

We were invited to an AMA with the team over at Matic Network in their official telegram channel on 19th January at 8PM IST. We are operating our validator Witval for Matic Network: https://wallet.matic.network/staking/validators/50
This AMA was hosted and moderated by Delroy Bosco . The topics for the AMA included :-

• Journey of Vitwit in the blockchain space.
• Overview of networks currently being validated by Vitwit.
• Experience of validating on Matic network.
• Security practices
• Delegation strategy

Here’s a summarised transcript of the AMA:-

Delroy: Hey Anil, how are you doing man? Thanks for joining us today. To those of you that don’t know Anil and his team at Vitwit are also core contributors to our core components on Heimdall.

Anil: Hello Delroy, doing great! Thanks for having me here today. Super excited! To give you a brief intro, I am Anil, CTO at Vitwit. We are a blockchain & AI consulting company established in 2015. We help our clients and partners with development and consulting services. We started with AI & Cloud services initially and entered into the blockchain domain in 2017. We were developing dApps on Ethereum and started exploring PoS ecosystems in parallel.

Delroy: Would you like to tell us about some of the networks you’re operating nodes on?

Anil: Our Validator Moniker is Witval. We operate and maintain our validator nodes on a whole host of networks built on top of Cosmos SDK as well as other PoS networks. We currently validate on Matic network, Akash network, E-money, Oasis Protocol, Regen network, CosmWasm testnet, Bigbang, Althea-Peggy testnet, Desmos network, Certik chain, Agoric testnet and Witnet. We are also designing and leading the Bigbang Stargate testnet for Cosmos. Along with managing our validators on these networks we also provide our validator hosting services to third party clients. In addition to our validators which we operate under the moniker of Witval we are also operating validators for our clients on Akash network, Solana, Casper network and Graph protocol.

Delroy: That’s a whole host of networks! So what made you guys choose Matic Network to operate your node on? What was the decisive factor?

Anil: Thanks for asking this question. Ethereum has a great community and Matic Network solves the bigger issues of Scalability and affordability of this ecosystem. It’s the best layer-2 solution out there. The vision and execution is what attracted us the most and we wanted to collaborate and be a part of the Matic ecosystem without a second thought after seeing the execution and deliveries. Matic is now one of our prime networks and we are looking forward to contributing more in the coming days. We are proud to be one of the Matic Network Advisory Board members.

Delroy: And how has been your experience so far operating a node on Matic and working with the ecosystem and now on the Advisory Board?

Anil: It’s been the best! When the foundation team is strong, we face the least number of issues and you are doing great Delroy. I doubt you ever sleep, seem to be available all the time. Operating our validator node on Matic is a very smooth experience and never had any issues. The team and community here are all experienced and that quality is visible from the documentation to the piece of software. The advisory board is a great initiation and congratulations on launching such an initiative. It’s really important to have that to secure the network. I can’t wait to see the governance controlled board and thus making the Matic vision of decentralization, a reality.

Delroy: Thanks a lot Anil. It is validators such as you guys who are helping us bring the initiatives to life. And yes, we too are excited about Governance. So this goes without saying, that you are operating nodes on multiple networks comes with experience. Would you like to explain to us how do you ensure the security of your node?

Anil: Along with having robust logging and monitoring tools in place we have also have our validator server isolated from the network and behind multiple sentry nodes. This protects our validator from any DDoS attacks and keeps our IP address private to prevent any phishing attacks. We also have back up private sentry nodes which can be used in case of any hardware emergency. This backup server will ensure minimal downtime from our end in case of any catastrophic event. To keep the validator server as secure as possible only a select number of individuals have the correct permissions to access the server.

Delroy: Thanks for sharing this with us Anil. So what do you think about Delegation? How excited are you? And why do you think Delegators should delegate to your node?

We understand and bring handy tools for the ecosystem players. We believe with more support from the delegators, we can focus more and bring in required infra and secure the network in the long run. To be precise, I would say the following points makes us one of the most trustable and secure validators,
- We have a strong DevOps team to handle our highly available validator infrastructure.
- High security and Technical capacity.
- Good understanding of governance processes and decision making.
- Experience of operating validators on 10+ networks and handled well-over 30 network upgrades smoothly (including testnets).
- Low to moderate commission rates.
- Building tools for the ecosystem to help the community. We recently built Matic-Jagar to help Matic validator community to monitor their validators better.
- One of the Matic Advisory Board Members.
- Good uptime and never jailed track record.

We believe that the delegators are the backbone for any validator ecosystem. It’s not just about the commission rates but the secure infra, key management, high-availability and more importantly our governance decisions is what places us as one of the trusted validators in the PoS ecosystem. As we are into development services and building blockchain applications, we understand what it takes for the upgrades and what impacts it’s gonna have on the network all together. This gives us a better understanding and helps us decide on our vote on governance proposals. We believe it’s important to reason out our vote choice and communicate openly with other players in the ecosystem for sharing the information required for others to process and make decisions. Hope we are matching the criteria that Matic delegators looking for :)

Delroy: Wow! I would to love to hear more about the soft-slash protection.

Anil: Downtime slashing will slash some tokens from delegators too. So incase of any issues with the validator node and if it gets slashed, we’ll make sure delegators don’t lose any of their tokens (even if it is single token, we value our delegators). We’ll offer soft-slash protection and make sure to refund the slashed tokens.

Delroy: That’s really great! I’m sure you must getting a lot of questions from from different people, What kind of concerns do people have when considering who to delegate through and how do you address these?

Anil: When a person does not want to go through the hassle of setting up a validator and maintain it on a timely basis, delegation of those tokens to an existing validator is his best bet. For a majority of the delegators, the main concern is the amount of rewards they’ll be getting once staked, i.e., low commission rates. But ideally a delegator would look at the previous track record of a validator and their additional contributions to the community. An ideal validator should have a good uptime in signing blocks and we make sure to provide the best uptime possible from our end. We believe its validators plus delegators responsibility to secure the network. Also the track record of the validators they choose should include their governance decisions and reasoning they come up with.

Delroy: Absolutely!

Anil: We have seen some validators going down/stopping their ops due to maintenance issues and ROI. One of the reasons for ROI failures is because they were fully dependent on Validator rewards. We address this by separating our other business needs and look at Validator rewards as an extra income source. We still look for break-even but as we have other sources to generate revenue, like with tools and other community engagement activities, it never forced us to charge a high commission or forced us stop our validator on any network. One more important challenge is with low experience with migrating nodes. Most of the validators depend on single cloud providers, and don’t try to diversify their sentry nodes. We address this by operating a multi-cloud infrastructure and we always ensure this by having our nodes distributed at least in 3-regions. One other big risk with migration is double signing. We consider this as the most critical thing and make sure to dryrun before actually making validator keys available for the node after migrating. One other issue we have seen was with lack of expertise in running a highly-available validator infra.

Delroy: Beautifully put Anil! I think this will really help validators understand. I have another question for you- What are the first things you’d encourage someone like up and coming Validators on POS networks to consider before getting started?

Anil: One of the best things we did 2 years back was we started validating on testnets. For any validator, beginner or experienced, testnets are their best friend. It provides a perfect platform for people to figure out just how much effort goes into operating a validator on the network. For a beginner it provides a perfect sandbox environment to understand the intricacies of the network and for an experienced validator it provides a good platform to tinker with their setup to make it more robust. As there is no risk of losing funds it is a win win situation for the validators to experiment and the network to figure out any underlying bugs. We experimented all our sentry architectures on testnets and designed it well. One of the key things to focus on is key-management and access-management. It would look easy initially, but as the number of validators grow, we’ll understand the importance. It’s better ensure this from day-1 so we can ensure a secure setup for validators.

Delroy: Thanks for your answers Anil! With that I’m going to open the channel for community questions.

Li: What are some of the strategies you use to attract new users and investors to Vitwit? Do you organize special activities for your community to reward them for their compromise to Vitwit?

Anil: We interact with community and be active in the ecosystem mostly. We try to help with handy tools, solve the real problems and that’s working best for us :)

Zafer Metin: Why did VitWit choose to partner with Matic in the industry and how will Matic’s success in the industry benefit VitWit?

Anil: Yes, we are looking forward for a long term relationship. We’re currently collaborating on upgrading the heimdall and building tools for the ecosystem here. Stay tuned for more updates from us.

Dalmasca Blockchain: Vitwit recently helped in launching Inter Blockchain Communication feature. Can you explain what is the feature usecase?

Anil: We helped Cosmos teams deliver stargate, one of the biggest releases of cosmos-sdk. IBC allows users to transfer tokens across chains securely without any third parties. So basically you can transfer your ETH or any ERC20 or BTC onto any other chain and use it there. We believe 2021 would be a year of interoperability.

Zafer Metin: What is VitWit’s experience and industry background in areas such as blockchain implementation, prototyping, testing, and how do these applications streamline and robust the business model for a secure transaction method?

Anil: We started with building DApps in 2017 and we are in this Pos ecosystem for more than 2 years now and have a highly experienced DevOps team to handle our critical validator infra and security. We are helping Regen team to build and maintain Cosmos-SDK, one of the leading PoS ecosystems our there. We have experience in building Cosmos-SDK based applications, launching blockchains, upgrades and conducting incentivized testnets.
We also develop tools for the PoS ecosystem and recently launched Matic-Jagar, an alerting and monitoring tool for Matic Validators. We co-developed similar kinds of tools along in partnership with Chainflow for Cosmos and Oasis networks before. We have our own version of explorer called Aneka for the Cosmos ecosystem and now looking forward to expanding it to other ecosystems.

Delroy: Thanks for answering our questions Anil. We would love to do this again sometime in the future. It was a pleasure hosting you!

Anil: Thank you for hosting this. It was great connecting with the community.

Final words:

We at Vitwit are committed to support PoS networks we believe in and Matic Network is one of our prime networks. We are building multiple tools internally to help the community and can’t wait to make them available for Matic community in near future. We strive for decentralization and advice all the delegators to spread the delegations to make the network truly decentralized and thus secured. Here are our validator details in case if you would like to help us with a deligation:
Moniker: Witval
Validator Link: https://wallet.matic.network/staking/validators/50