Infrastructure - Sequencer Proposal: Artifact Systems

**Executive Summary**

Artifact Systems is a high performance institutional Web3 infrastructure company that provides enterprise grade RPC, validation, and zkProver services. Artifact was founded in 2020 with the sole objective of positively influencing the growth and development of the cryptocurrency industry. Artifact is 100% self-funded and has no outstanding debt, financial obligations, or investors.

In addition to being a Chainlink Oracle operator, our global team of seventeen people run infrastructure on over 53 blockchains. Artifact processes approximately 4 billion RPC requests per month and has $1.2 billion of USD equivalent stake across our entire platform, primarily in Ethereum, Aptos, Sui, and Avalanche.

Unlike most infrastructure providers, Artifact owns and operates our own fleet of servers within our own secure racks. We have racks in multiple data centers located in the United States, Costa Rica, Ireland, and Japan. Our ability to build custom servers for our clients gives us serious competitive edge over the standardized server offerings available from cloud providers.

We take geographical decentralization very seriously and invest substantial time and money into ensuring that we operate in regions that add to diversification. As an example of our commitment to decentralization, Artifact is the only Web3 infrastructure provider in the world that operates nodes out of Central America.

Metis Experience

Artifact has years of experience with running Metis validators as well as Metis full nodes. We run multiple redundant full nodes that are positioned behind load balancers.

Service Level Agreement

Artifact currently operates on more than 53 blockchains for numerous Web3 institutions. We offer a 99.9% uptime SLA to our enterprise clients which we will extend to our Metis Sequencers. We will deploy multiple sequencer nodes in a primary/secondary arrangement across multiple physical locations to ensure hardware redundancy and enable robust failover capabilities.

Our globally distributed Node Operations team is on call 24/7 and utilizes real time system monitoring and alerting to stay on top of our Metis node fleet. In addition, we have a suite of proprietary automated failover tools.

Benefits to Community

Artifact Systems is active in the Metis community. Most recently we acted as one of the lead sponsors for the Metis’s Official Opening Party for ETH Denver. In addition to assisting Metis with funding community parties, we also sponsor and host hacker houses in North America, South America, and Europe.

We will gladly spend a portion of our sequencer revenue on supporting the community through parties and hacker houses.

https://twitter.com/MetisFest/status/1749462356969635967

Integration Roadmap

If we are selected to operate a sequencer, Artifact will quickly take the required steps to launch our primary sequencer and sequencer hot spares on mainnet.

Artifact Pledge

Artifact commits to provide Sequencer as a Service with the goal to ensure network stability and continuous improvement of the Metis project:

• We will be highly responsive to Metis software updates, governance proposals, and provide any and all non-client privileged data as needed.
• We will meet or exceed the minimum required hardware and security specifications.
• Collaborate with the Metis team, other Metis operators, and the Metis community as a whole to share best practices, tools, recommendations, and community education as needed.

Artifact will meet or exceed Metis’ Reliability Standards:

• Our Solana RPC business line has given us hands-on experience with managing highly intensive and rapidly expanding hardware requirements. As a result, we run oversized hardware on all of our chains.
• Due to our tendency to run oversized nodes, we feel that we will maintain high standards for liveness and participation.
• Artifact is known for providing high uptimes and has never been slashed, jailed, or “soft-slashed” for outages or quality of service on any other blockchain.
• Artifact commits to using a diverse set of data center providers and cloud providers.
• Artifact recognizes that most node operators utilizes the same cloud providers such as AWS, Google Could, and Hetzner. In the spirit of decentralization, Artifact does not use these providers unless specifically mandated by a client or blockchain project.

Official Links

https://artifact-systems.io/