Adding stakefish as an xDAI validator

stakefish is submitting its official proposal to become an xDAI validator. The xDAI team has confirmed that it plans to transfer one of its current validator nodes in lieu of delegation (as proposed in the main xDAI forum thread).

Here is the official xDAI forum thread on our application: https://forum.poa.network/t/stakefish-as-an-xdai-validator/5565

There were important conversations with the community that were conducted in this forum thread that included clarifications the community had on the specifics of delegations vs grants, professional validator service provider responsibilities, the economics of delegations and larger service provider contributions to the xDAI community, and the specific contributions we can continue to provide for xDAI.

Given the xDAI team’s approval, answered questions on the community forum, and our plans for becoming inducted as a validator starting Epoch 57, we will be having the poll conclude May 15th, 2PM UTC.

For convenience, relevant details of the proposal are included here:

Project name: stakefish Project location: Global team covering 13 different time zones (legal presence in Malta) Project inception year: 2018 Team size: 29 Website: https://stake.fish/ (available in 16 different languages) Social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/stakefish Telegram: https://t.me/stakefish Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZvT8cGpFjnZUB9V-WzxPHg Medium: https://medium.com/stakefish

Networks supported: Ethereum 2.0, Chainlink, The Graph, Polygon (launching by end of April), Polkadot, Cosmos, Tezos, NEAR (for the full list, please visit stake.fish)

Total assets staked: Over $1 billion staked across networks

Motivation: Our goal is to build a resilient infrastructure layer for blockchain projects of the future. With this goal in mind, we have been supporting critical Proof of Stake protocols and middleware projects from 2018 when many were in bootstrapping phases.

It is no secret that Ethereum has faced challenges with high gas prices, effectively pricing out many retail users. This is a good problem to have as it shows strong demand for block space on Ethereum! While scalability will naturally be solved as Ethereum 2.0 rolls out, we need other options today. As an Ethereum-friendly sidechain that has been honest with the ecosystem and developer focused, we believe xDai has more than proven its place in Ethereum’s ecosystem. The growing list of projects deployed on xDai attests to this: Gnosis, Perpetual Protocol, Colony, POAP, Dark Forest, etc.

While staking is our main source of revenue, our foremost duty and responsibility in this ecosystem is to provide a resilient infrastructure for critical networks and protocols. xDai has been at the forefront of Ethereum scalability and we want to contribute by helping maintain its network as a validator.

Security setup: We make use of multiple cloud providers across different regions. We take multiple factors into account when deciding the providers and regions, including connectivity with the rest of the network and assisting in decentralizing the validating infrastructure across the entire network.

We have 24/7 monitoring across all layers of our infrastructure. We have alerts set up for various metrics when thresholds are triggered. We also have an incident response plan, and disaster recovery plan to handle any emergency scenarios, such as chain halts and emergency upgrades.

Contributions to the ecosystem:

Promoting decentralization and open source

• Ethereum 2.0 decentralization transparency initiative
• Eth2 Batch Deposit contract
• Deposit verification contract

Community building

• Sponsoring and hosting events (example 1, example 2)
• Powering memes (Optimism eye mask)
• Powering grants (grant.fish)

Education

• How to stake videos (example 1, example 2)
• Blog posts on new concepts (Ethereum 2.0, Optimism)

Our expected contributions: We plan to create videos, run memes, and educate community members on how to stake on xDai. We run one of the largest validator operations on Ethereum 2.0. We plan to branch out to other sidechains and Layer 2s. Running bridges for xDai will be relatively a trivial task for us. We can provide advisory on best practices we’ve seen from other networks both on validator management and governance. We can help attract more validators to xDai.