Validator Ecosystem Development Programs

Validators and Node Operators
1

More delegations to validators from the treasury are being considered. For evaluation, we’ll consider a combination of validators’ technical capabilities & initiatives to continue building with the community. If there is a program you’re intending to run with the % of your commissions, build tools, protocols, or support the ecosystem in any other business development efforts, please post your proposal below for consideration. Please provide a brief description of your program, timeline, and why a delegation to your validator will help you execute on this program.

Deadline: Monday Oct 17th 11.59pm [anywhere on earth].

8 Likes
2

Sergey,

I don’t have any specific tools in mind at this moment in time, but I’m curious what types of BD efforts would be considered a value add. We’ve always tried my best in this regard especially as it relates to Secret Network relationships and building. Have already been talking to Kate & Jake about doing some sort of joint hackathon when the technical integrations are a bit further along. Perhaps that could be flushed out a bit more and considered?

We’re very grateful for the opportunity to support Axelar and very excited for the future of the chain as always.

  • Brendan | WhisperNode
3

It’s really an open call for proposals. If organizing a hackathon is something you’re interested in doing, that’s great.

1 Like
4

Hey Sergey, thanks for the info about the program.

We are a relatively new validator on Axelar and currently maintaining all 7 bridges. Besides this, we run IBC relays and maintain various public infrastructure for Axelar:

IBC relay: we operate 10 IBC channels for Axelar. See details here.

Node Public Infrastructure : We provide state-sync, node snapshot, live peers, seed node, addrbook, RPC, API, and gRPC for Axelar. See details here.

Besides Axelar, we offer the same service to >30 chains in the Cosmos ecosystem. The idea is that every connected chain will benefit from a thriving ecosystem.

A delegation from the treasury will help us sustain the level of support for Axelar and beyond. That said, we offer the same support on every chain we validate on regardless of foundation delegation.

Thank you for your consideration.

3 Likes
5

Hello Sergey,

We have been working on a site targeting delegators

This will have articles explaining things about staking, will create videos as well explaining it with examples.

Also, we have chosen to calculate the APY based on the returns we get from each validator. This way we can be sure what is the exact returns for the past day or week or month

We will also plot that as a daily returns graph

the same can be done for commission, total stake, chains supported etc so the delegators can make an informed decision at any point.

The site’s still not done completely. Once this is done we will let everyone know about it.

The plan is to keep adding features which is needed to make a decision to choose which validator.

Note: currently the data is refreshed every. hour/day. This will be changed to 5min once complete.

3 Likes
6

Hey Sergey,

As early supporters of Axelar, we would like to continue that path going forward. Besides the articles we did (as a new forum user i cant link them, please see our medium @popsteam), our proposal is 4-fold, and we plan to do at least 3 if not all 4 no matter the outcome of this program:

  • We will continue running RPC nodes as we did from the start
  • We will continue providing technical support on Axelar discord, our discord and via DM to node operators as we have done since we started
  • We will continue to develop our Axelar tools repo, which is usable in any of the testnets or mainnet:
  • Weekly or biweekly twitter/twitter space or other social awareness contest
    • The idea is to use some of our validator profits and distribute to participants in our contests by getting people engaged
    • The contests would consist of educational material about Axelar, from technical to partnerships to pure end users (Satellite)
    • This way we raise awareness in a fun and educational way while users will be able to earn some tokens in the process

The commission would be used to pay for these activities, from servers to people that will be working on these initiatives. We would be super happy if we would be considered in the delegation program, but even if not, we plan to at least continue the first 3 points that I mentioned.

P-OPS Team

7

Proposal : Give back 10% of AXL Noderun commissions as quick grants.

With a minimum of 5M AXL added in delegation (and as long as delegated) from the foundation to NodeRun, we will start to allocate 10% of our fees on all the tokens delegated to Noderun and give it back to the AXL ecosystem using what we call “quick grants”.

  1. We will use a relatively short and simple google form and will grant 1-2 small quick allocations every quarter depending on the size of the rewards/delegation. On each potential grant we will advise with the foundation and will priorities projects contributing to the Axelar network growth and usage.
  2. Our partner, Node.Capital will keep investing in the Axelar eco system the way they already did with one new project that is not announced yet.
  3. We will continue being highly involved with governance.
  4. We are a leading provider in other cosmos chains with the highest standards.

We appreciate any feedback and suggestions

1 Like
8

Hi Axelar community,

Forbole proposes to build a Big Dipper explorer for Axelar supported by the commission we earn from delegation.

Big Dipper is an open source block explorer very popular in Cosmos ecosystem developed by Forboole. It has been forked over 300 times. Though many projects build their own explorers forked from Big Dipper, we also offer “official” support to run and maintain the explorer for projects too. We could provide customized modules for Axelar specifically.

We will use the earnings from delegation to support our in house developers, designers, and product personnel working on the Big Dipper explorer for Axelar.

Please check out more on www.forbole.com & www.bigdipper.live.

Thank you for your consideration!

9

Hey Sergey,

We can lower the commission rate to 8.5%. [We’re open to dropping it more.]

Regarding community building, we plan to build web apps using the available SDKs. So, we plan to start building with Squid SDK & AxelarSDK.

  • The apps will target end-users who never heard of or tried cross-chain technology before.
  • The built apps will be plugged into the CoinHippo site. So, users can experience cross-chain with Axelar from there.
  • We will open source the built apps. So, new learners can use them as templates/starting points to build one themselves. This will benefit those who don’t want to start learning from scratch.
  • The apps will be developed by us with helps from our dev partners/networks.

We’ll also continue sharing and retweeting news/social network content to increase public awareness of Axelar.

CoinHippo

10

Hello! We at Everstake would love to propose one of our recently developed services — providing an access to Slurp API for large entities/companies, VCs or for Axelar Network team themselves. The MVP is ready. Slurp gets the data from blockchains directly with no delays. Use Slurp to get more precise insights on your customers, their staking behavior, delegators rewards analysis etc.

I’m attaching the presentation. It contains the general information about the product. Axelar is not in the list of the blockchains mentioned but it is actually supported. We’ll be happy to provide more details on request!

11

Hello!
P2P Validator is currently developing an Indexer & API solution for Cosmos. It will be compatible with any Tendermint/Cosmos SDK chain. The solution extracts and indexes all transactions in a given blockchain, then stores the information in a database. An open-source headless BI tool is used for secondary indexing of the data according to a predefined data model and makes it accessible via REST, GraphQL or SQL APIs.
This solution is quite versatile and might be used to build any community tools (e.g. public dashboards), as well as being provided to developer teams to build anything on top of it. This configuration can be used in production environments with a high load and includes additional performance-related features such as pre-aggregations and caching.
The product will include all basic Cosmos-SDK & Tendermint metrics in its data model as a default, but P2P can further customise it to account for any chain-specific metrics Axelar might want to include. Also we might roll out the solution to other chains (e.g. Osmosis) to build a more full picture of transaction moving through Axelar.
I would be most happy to provide more details if required!
We are actually open to any ideas around data processing and/or analysis, so please fill free to reach out if there are any specific use cases that need to be covered.

We can also run elements of public infrastructure (e.g. RPC nodes, relayers) - would love to get feedback on what would be most relevant for the community right now. We are ready to set up some of these regardless of delegations under this program.

1 Like
12

Hey Sergey,

Being with the project from the early stages, it’s really great to see what Axelar has achieved today.

Currently we are hosting a bot which can poll proposals directly from the chain and post it into discord, well formatted and tag a specific role to inform about the new proposal. This reduces the headache of the team to post every proposal manually.

Not only that it has all the necessary links:

  1. Link to proposal on explorer
  2. Link to keplr where one can connect their wallet and vote

Here is a screenshot of the bot, this is currently setup in #proposal channels of our server

Proposal Bot
Proposal Bot1610×1120 87.7 KB

Apart from this, we have a nice monitoring dashboard setup around Axelar Services which we have made public for any validator to use, they are well color coded. If anything goes wrong, it will show up as red and will catch the eye. Here is the repo: GitHub - aditya-manit/axelar-services-dashboard: This repo provides grafana dashboards to monitor health Axelar Services

Monitoring

We also provide RPC and LCD servers for anyone to query and use

RPC: http://143.110.251.173:26657/
LCD: http://143.110.251.173:1317/

In the past we have extensively raised PRs and helped in improving docs, for example: the manual setup of axelard and its services using systemd and its upgrade process was written by me: Manual setup | Axelar Network among contributions to other pages.

We will continue to contribute and will do our best to make sure the documentation is the best version of itself.

13

Hi Sergey,

As you may know, Stakin has been operating since early Axelar testnets.

We would be happy to be considered for further delegations.

Some of our past contributions include Engineering (testnet and dashboard), Marketing and Community. Further delegation to our validator will assist us in maintaining our work and supporting the Axelar ecosystem.

Some of our past work include:

  • Dashboard: check out your AXL stake, claimed, claimable and pending rewards, and track your overall staked portfolio dashboard.stakin.com.
  • Content: introduction, staking guide (blog.stakin.com/tag/axelar-network/)
  • IBC Relay: Axelar <> Cosmos IBC relayer
  • Proprietary RPC nodes: we maintain the 7 bridges on Axelar by running our own RPC nodes, which contributes to reliability and decentralization

Some of the things we’d like to do soon:

  • Video guides on Axelar (“Introduction”, “How To Stake” guide, and a user guide for “Axelar Satellite”). Our latest videos can be found at youtube.com/stakin.
  • Podcast: Stakin podcasts playlist
  • Twitter Space

Besides that, if you feel there are specific efforts and projects we could work on to improve Axelar, we’d love to consider some of these.

Thank you for your consideration.

14

Hello Sergey,

We are heavily invested in our decentralised API product (https://blastapi.io) and we think it might come in handy for the validators ecosystem.

As you may already know, we support a wide range of networks used by Axelar:

  • Ethereum Goerli + Mainnet
  • Moonbase Alpha + Moonbeam
  • Avalanche Fuji + Mainnet
  • Polygon Mumbai + Mainnet
  • BNB Chain Testnet with Mainnet support coming soon
  • Fantom Testnet + Mainnet

Of course, the validators should run their own RPC infrastructure, but we could help with implementing a fallback mechanism for the vald process, that could have a primary RPC (in this case, the validator’s own RPC node) + a secondary RPC that could be represented by a BlastApi endpoint (be it public or custom) that will be able to handle requests if the primary API source fails. This will NOT replace the current requirements for validators (running their own RPC infrastructure), instead it will help with the overall performance of Axelar’s cross-chain communication protocol in a decentralized manner (once our platform itself becomes decentralized).We could also offer relevant metrics regarding requests that have been received by the fallback RPCs and offer useful insights for the protocol.

Thank you for your consideration and please let us know what you think!

15

Another thread would be around some events that we are organizing in the heart of Bucharest - which is a well-known hub for developers.

We have once per quarter an event “Blockchain talks” where we are doing in-person technical discussions around blockchain technologies, where we invite leaders from the industry and developers. We could do a technical presentation and a proof of concept around Axelar SDK.

(Previous event: Blockchain Talks Tickets, Wed, Jun 15, 2022 at 7:00 PM | Eventbrite)

We were also thinking of organizing a hackathon at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest - where we could attract more developers on familiarising and building with Axelar.

16

Hi Axelar team and community,

As early supporters of the ecosystem since the first Testnet phases we have contributed with the following:

We would like to continue the support and operations of the above mentioned points, infrastructure and public goods like the RPC/API endpoints. Also, we would like to continue to support the expansion of the integrated protocols within the Axelar Network by operating the necessary RPC/API infrastructure.

We are definitely also open to operating relay infrastructure, if this is in demand or if it would be helpful at this point to contribute in that area.

Another tool that we have in the pipeline is a CSV/Excel Exporter, as we have observed to be of high relevance and great use for everyone, especially when the tax season approaches.

Last but not least, we will continue to highlight to our expanding community and stakeholders the work and results of the Axelar team, developers and ecosystem.

We appreciate the initiative of supporting the Validators based on relevant metrics and our team is happy to have been a part of this journey since the initial stages.

Thank you,
Chainode Tech

17

Hello,

Currently, bots and tools related to external chain and EVM votes are in progress. In addition, we are preparing an alternative to Axelarscan, a Cosmos-based explorer.

  1. We have a bot that we have prepared for RPC nodes and EVM votes to instantly warn about any problem. To talk about the functionality of this bot, we have prepared a bot that sends an alert if any validator gives a different VOTE in an EVM pool than the majority of other validators. In this way, we aim for RPC nodes to receive alerts faster and for validators to provide instant control. Everything is done so far. In addition to this, we will add one more feature that he can control in his team. With the PollFailed - PollExpired events, if an external network sees its pools are faulty in the last hours, you will be able to ping someone from the team and provide instant control. We aim to make the activities of EVM votes and pools more quickly traceable. We were thinking of making a more complicated bot that can also control register/(auto)deregister events and integrating it into our EVM-votes bot.

  2. We are developing a tool to monitor upgrades to external chains. We hope to accomplish this by preventing any validators from neglecting crucial RPC upgrades. Validators will be able to keep track of all external chain upgrades using the UI we have created. Additionally, we’ll create a bot that notifies validators of mandatory network updates.

  3. We are working on an alternative Axelar explorer based on Cosmos, where EVM votes, and heartbeats can be viewed. We’ve made progress on many parts of the Cosmos side. We are working on developing the design of Explorer, we aim to include Evm votes, heartbeats and make it available after completing the design. Since this idea is so new, we aim to finish it by the end of the year. Important features like TVL - Batches will be added later. Not only will Axelar benefit greatly from this, but the entire ecosystem as well. We can share a prototype link with you if you would like.

  • Also, we’re relaying 7+ chains for Axelar

We started this work before the release of this delegation program. We have a long history with Axelar, and we can also provide the following general support:

  • Supporting community mods on Axelar Turkish local channel - we already do this -
  • Archive node
  • Public (g)RPC/LCD
  • We had some suggestions about partnering Axelar with different projects before. We will always try to support Axelar in possible partnerships.
  • We are planning to host some blockchain events in Turkey. Also we can organize conferences at various universities such as ITU, METU etc. and bring Axelar together with users at more concrete events. There will be some events that will be held soon and many major projects will participate. We would be pleased to welcome you here. will share the necessary information about the events with Kate.

We are planning to release the Evm votes & Heartbeast bot and external chain tool in the coming months.
Although our target for Explorer is EOY, it could be delayed to early of 2023.
Regards.

19

Hello Sergey,

Thanks for the information, and glad to share our contributions.

DSRV is now providing the following to the Axelar ecosystem

  • Validator: Running validator with all seven bridges.

  • IBC relayer: 1 relayer. Axelar-AssetMantle

  • Public Endpoints: available at AllThatNode

    • Mainnet: REST API, Tendermint RPC
      • Mainnet archive node will be available at the end of October
    • Casablanca : REST API, Tendermint RPC
    • Lisbon: REST API, Tendermint RPC

  • Snapshot (pruned only): (available from above site)

    • Mainnet

  • Node Map: (available from above site)

    • Mainnet: You can see past node maps by specifying a date

  • Testnet Faucets: available at AllThatNode

    • Lisbon
    • Casablanca (Lack of funds): We are looking forward to some donations for the faucet

We offer services similar to 20+ protocols and would like to contribute more to the Axelar ecosystem.
It would be helpful to maintain and improve the level of service if we could get a delegation from the treasury.
We are also considering providing more infrastructure for Axelar, including seed nodes, archive nodes, more relayer, state-sync, etc.

Always welcome any feedback and suggestions. Thanks!

DSRV Team

2 Likes
20

Hello Axelar team,

Having supported Axelar from the testnet stage, It is very inspiring to see how the team is building the product and community, providing opportunities to develop and be involved with the ecosystem.

I would like to present our past contributions and plans divided into three fields:

Monitoring tools
We are currently developing our monitoring system with Telegram alerting based on explorer and RPCs parsing. It allows us to track our validator node state online and covers only base parameters for now (blockheight check, missed blocks count, stale heartbeats, etc).

Снимок экрана 2022-10-17 в 23.53.19
Снимок экрана 2022-10-17 в 23.53.192426×645 134 KB

We are now working on a functionality extension, bringing in additional network state parameters, EVM votes accuracy, and proposal events. I hope we finish this within a month and make this tool open-source for the Axelar community.

Node Public Infrastructure
We have provided various public infrastructure such as RPC, LCD, and gRPC endpoints for Axelar mainnet & testnet since early July 2022. See official Axelar’s Resources page.

Also, we are working closely with several ecosystem projects that have received support from the Axelar team and we are also helping them to maintain private node infrastructure for the development and testing their solutions. This allows these teams to focus fully on building and enhancing their own product rather than creating the infrastructure for it from scratch. Some of those projects are:

  1. DOM Money – unstoppable wallet with a convenient neobank interface, virtual bank cards and cross-chain yield mining, providing the highest possible yield in stablecoins from trusted DeFi protocols (Axelerator Grant Challenge Winner)
  2. 88x is an automated cross-chain yield aggregator that allows building farming strategies across different blockchain networks within a single interface. 88x is built on top of Axelar Network and Symbiosis Finance

We provide these services free of charge and are open to collaboration with other promising projects.

Business development efforts
We are always looking for opportunities to promote our portfolio companies and help them to build mutually beneficial partnerships. For example, we publicly advised the dYdX team to partner up with Axelar in the field of USDC bridging in their upcoming Cosmos migration. See details here and here.

Besides, considering the latest news about the Sui & Axelar partnership, we would be happy to connect the team with Aptos, another promising layer one network, and maybe assist with some possible technical issues, because we have been supporting Aptos since the beginning of the year as a testnet & mainnet validator.

Also, we will continue being highly involved with governance across all supported networks.

Why a delegation to your validator will help you execute this program
In the current market phase, any crypto company must be able to create a sustainable business model and remain stable regardless of external factors. This is particularly relevant for small companies. For us, as a young validation company, the Foundation’s support is crucial to deliver the highest quality service and contribute to the ecosystem development.

Many thanks for considering our request.

QuantNode team

2 Likes
21

Hey Sergey,

Rockaway Infra is a true believer in the decentralization of blockchain networks. We operate our services on fully owned bare metal hardware in dedicated racks in multiple directly interconnected data centers.

  • In cooperation with our Labs team, we are building Cosmos Observatory, which checks the network’s health in terms of decentralization metrics - Nakamoto coefficient
    – Validator nodes
    – Countries
    – ISP and ASN.

  • In a few weeks, we will release a technical podcast series with validators running their decentralized infrastructures. We are also publishing deep dive articles about blockchains we are operating e.g. How we launched our Axelar validator

  • As a service to the community, we are providing free RPC and gRPC endpoints:
    – RPC: https://axelar-rpc.rockrpc.net
    – REST: https://axelar-rest.rockrpc.net

  • We are big promoters of the Cosmos ecosystem and this year we have organized the biggest European cosmos-based conference – Gateway to Cosmos – where more than 500 Cosmonauts had 2 fully packed days to meet the ecosystem leaders – check the Aftermovie and playlist of all 33 presentations/workshops
    Next year, Gateway conference will be even bigger.

We are proud to be part of this thriving community and further delegation will help us fund more public goods projects.

Thank you
Rockaway Infra

2 Likes