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Meet the Validators ft. Zellic, Informal Systems, SCV, and Kiln
Recorded: May 29, 2025 Duration: 1:01:51Space Recording
Short Summary
The recent discussion among key validators in the Injective ecosystem revealed a successful campaign launch, emphasizing growth through zero-commission yields, strategic partnerships for enhanced security, and a focus on community engagement. This initiative not only supports the ecosystem's development but also sets a trend towards responsible practices in the crypto space.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Well, good morning, afternoon, evening to everybody.
Hope everyone's doing well.
I'm super excited for this space is happening today.
And it looks like we already have our
first speaker on stage, Eric.
Eric, how's it going?
Good, man.
How about you?
Good to see you.
Likewise, likewise.
Yeah, it's going to be a great conversation today.
So for the audience, give us a couple minutes, get all the speakers up here on stage and
then we'll get things started. Thank you. All right.
We're getting a couple more speakers up here.
It looks like we got the SCV account.
Can we go ahead and test your audio?
Hey, everyone.
This is Alk here.
Hey, Alk.
How are you?
Great.
How about yourself?
I'm doing well.
I'm doing well.
All right.
We've got a few more coming up here.
All right. We got Achilles on stage.
Achilles, are you with us?
I'm not hearing you at this point.
Can you guys hear me okay? There we go. Yep. Loud and
quick. Yeah, the audio is not coming through completely clear
on my end.
Sounds good on here though. You do at least.
Good to hear.
And let's see Achilles, we didn't hear you previously.
Do you mind testing again?
Can you guys hear me now?
There we go.
Yes, we can.
Perfect.
Sorry.
No worries.
No worries.
All right. We just have one more, I think, to bring up on stage, and then we will get things started. Thank you. All right, we are five minutes past the hour.
I think it's a good place to get things kicked off.
First of all, I want to thank everyone for joining here.
You know, this has been a sort of in the making here for quite a number of days and months at this point.
And we've already seen some great traction just in the first 48 hours of this campaign.
first 48 hours of this campaign. So I do want to just give the panelists to be able to kind of
introduce themselves. And then I will hand it off to my colleague Achilles to kind of take the
reins from here. But why don't we start with some intros? And I guess whoever wants can start it off.
Can you start it off?
Sure, I'll go first.
Hi, I'm Luna.
I'm the co-founder and CEO of Zelleck.
It's a pleasure to be here today.
We run in validators on Injective.
We've audited several pieces of Injective.
We just work very closely with Foundation,
and we're excited to continue the great work that we do
yeah i mean we've audited injective core we've audited the several modules
not sure exactly how much of that we can discuss but yeah thank you
yeah hey eric from zelek also uh I head up our validator efforts over here.
Really pleased to be with y'all today.
You know, like Luna says,
we've done quite a bit of work in the injective ecosystem.
And in addition to the work on the injective core stuff,
we've also audited, I mean, a number of ecosystem projects,
including like Truthin, DojoSwap.
So yeah, like I said, pleased to be here today with y'all. Cheers.
Hey, everyone. This is today with you all. Cheers.
Hey, everyone.
This is Elk representing SCV security.
SCV has been doing security research and with the focus of Cosmos SDK and CosmoOSM since 2021.
We've done many audits in the injective ecosystem,
similarly to Zelleck, like on core components
and also ecosystem projects.
You'll hear more about this later in detail,
but we've been a part of the validator set since early 2023.
And yeah, we're really excited to be here,
excited to be part of this campaign.
And it looks like the space has a great turnout,
so excited to talk to you all and tell you a bit more about what we're doing here over here
hey i'm matt from the informal systems validator we've been validating on injective since late
2022 we also provide audits for injective and run the metrics dashboard that monitors network health
and also do some engineering work related to mostly consensus.
Amazing. Well, cool. Thanks for the intro, you guys. Obviously, I think we have kind of a stacked
lineup here of people that are committed to
the Injective ecosystem, seeing it thrive and really seeing, you know, Injective go after,
you know, users, institutions, developers, and really being kind of the home for all of those
things. So with that being said, I do want to pass it off to Achilles. Maybe Achilles, if you want
to start the first few minutes, just going over the campaign, just kind of recapping, Achilles, if you want to start the first few minutes just going over the campaign, just kind of recapping some of the details about it, some of the early traction we've seen, and then let's just jump into it.
Yeah, of course. Thanks, Rocky.
So I should start by saying, as Rocky mentioned, the campaign has been very successful for the past two days.
campaign has been very successful for the past two days.
Basically, the campaign includes rebates for the next two months.
When a delegator delegates to a validator, there's a commission.
So if you make, let's say, one INJ, there's a commission
and every validator, normally that is between 5% and 10%.
So for the next two months, that is going to be zero
with some selected validators.
And the rewards will come to your wallets at the end of
the campaign. I also want to say that of course we work with some really big names in the validator
set who have helped grow the ecosystem a lot but the campaign focuses on the security auditors
that we work with because we think security
is the most important aspect of the ecosystem.
Obviously, we've seen many hacks throughout the past few years in other ecosystems and
projects.
And we are very happy that this has never happened on Interactive.
We've been in production for four years.
And we owe thanks to these partners who have helped secure the ecosystem
for the past few years and this ecosystem you know is part of an initiative to help
you know get more delegations of these validators who do these efforts um so we could jump you know
on the on the validators um and you know, I would say the first question would be,
how is the delegation revenue being used in the ecosystem
that you're producing,
and why would a delegator choose you over others?
And before we jump into that, Achilles, sorry,
we just had John from the Kiln team join us.
So John, if you just want to give a quick intro on yourself as well as Kiln, and then we can have people answer that question.
Yeah, sure. Can you hear me okay?
Loud and clear.
Absolutely fantastic. So yeah, introduce myself. My name is John Moraney. I'm a protocol specialist here at Kiln.
So who are Kiln? So we've been around since about 2018, working as a staking in the service space,
working primarily with enterprise customers, of which we have around about 180 today,
supporting over 50 plus different protocols from different EVMs and layer ones to providing
infrastructure services really across the blockchain for different foundations that we do
currently support so yeah that's a very quick kind of introduction to who we are and who I am and
then yes sure I'm happy to hand over so we can answer the question that was just put to all of us.
And yeah, anybody can take this first question. So whoever's ready to go ahead and unmute and then. Hey, yeah, go ahead, Matt. Sure. So I think the question was, how is the revenue being used from our current validator on Injective and why delegators would want to choose us as a validator?
So we've been a longtime supporter of Injective, to answer the second part of the question first here, since November of 2022. We provide a metrics dashboard that has over 30 real-time metrics being monitored,
everything from block metrics, like block processing time, speed, number of TXs,
and to mempool metrics and peering data as well.
All that's public and available on insights.informal.systems.
dot informal dot systems. We also provide audits. We have a pretty unique audit team here at informal
We also provide audits.
systems with a large background in distributed systems and formal verification that really
allows us to identify vulnerabilities that others might miss. This is especially true in cross-chain
protocols, consensus mechanisms, and complex systems interactions.
Outside of that, we provide some consensus engineering support through our team that supports Comet BFT.
And we really try to push our validator quality as well when it comes to uptime.
We have 24-7 monitoring support
from senior infrastructure engineers
and a very approachable team too
for delegators that want to reach out
about any issues that they're having.
We take feedback really seriously at our validator.
I'll pass it off to the next speaker.
It looks like Eric's ready to go.
Killer, Matt. Thanks for that overview, man. That was killer. Yeah. Hey, you know, like I say earlier,
essentially the way that our validator business works, especially with Injective, is the lion
share of the rewards that we earn from the commissions, from the delegation, both from
the foundation itself and of course from the community as well. We turn around and offer that back as audit credits to the labs and the foundation entities
for them to spend, again, to subsidize their own product developments.
Like Luna said, we've done a ton of core audits for the injective team.
And then of course, they could turn around and extend those out to those ecosystem teams
like DojoSwap, like TrueFin for supporting some novel mechanisms and novel developments in the system.
You know, our validator team is, they're cracked.
They're cracked.
We've got some folks from Fortune 500 teams
that have operated for years and years
and sure systems have been live in production.
And then of course, a ton of experience
in the Web3 DevOps ecosystem as well.
So it's been a ton of fun working with the injective team you know again uh very collaborative we enjoy that
quite a bit you know i think i i think that largely covers it we're excited to continue
working with the team and building that ecosystem out so pleased to be here with y'all yeah it's
it's awesome it's kind of like like almost like a credit card rewards program.
It's like all the commissions we get from the validator just go back to the foundation for audits.
That's really awesome to hear.
That's great for the ecosystem.
Yeah, I can answer this question for SCV if we're ready to move on.
So, yeah, for the first part of the question, a large part of the funding goes to proactive security measures.
So we have a number of auditors who have a ton of experience in Web 2 and Web 3 bug bounty programs.
So they have a pretty systematized approach to proactively looking for bugs in the wild.
So we usually, depending on the audit flow and the time of the year and the demand, we usually have an ongoing internal campaign to proactively identify issues within the ecosystem.
to identify issues within the ecosystem.
And similarly to the other validators here,
we have, and audit providers,
we have a partnership with Ejective Labs
that allows us to offer some pretty good discounts
to the ecosystem projects kind of on an ongoing basis.
So that's another way we give back
because we are engaging with these projects
kind of in the earlier phases
of their development sometimes.
And then also just funding security best practices
on our validator.
And I think we'll probably dig into that later
in one of the other questions.
But then to answer the second part of the question,
SCV security nodes run on an enterprise
hardware environment.
So this is closely monitored and maintained in house.
And of course, we take the node security very seriously, similarly to how we handle protocol
security.
So we utilize top quality hardware, quality upstream link to avoid latency between peers. And I think we're going to touch on this later, but yeah, SCV has a near 100% uptime.
So yeah, that's just a couple of components in the bigger picture of why delegators should
consider SCV and also how SCV uses the funding to give back to the community.
So I think I'm the last one's going to round this off. So from Kiln's perspective,
in regards to rewards for the customers who delegate to us, as well as foundation delegation,
customers who delegate to us as well as foundation delegation.
It's just often and always reinvested back into the protocol as well as our own kind of hardware and processes,
especially with a focus around security. As we mentioned again, I think you'll hear a lot of it from any kind of validated provider.
Reinvesting into our hardware practices, especially around redundancy, as well as compliance,
is an area that we are primarily focused on.
And for our customers who earn their rewards,
reinvesting back into applications,
and which allows us to obviously learn a lot more
about what's being built as well within the infrastructure.
And the ecosystem is a key component to any foundation
that we support on any blockchain.
Why Kiln?
Really, why Kiln?
We've obviously have a long history of supporting across multiple different
protocols, across kind of diverse hardware requirements and demands spread
completely globally as well, and creating these infrastructures that are so
kind of redundant and require us to provide an SLA that's very high and I'm sure we're going to move
on to that later but especially for our 180 plus customers, large institutions, the integrations we
have with some of the largest custodians in the world today is the BitGo's, the Fireblocks, the
Coppers obviously helps us kind of reduce for the ecosystem people who want to go ahead and stake
us kind of reduce for the ecosystem people who want to go ahead and stake a very quick on ramp
directly in just a couple of clicks to be able to do so we'll always be an api first platform as well
so make it very easy for people to build on top of us and provide kind of automated reporting
as well as rewards and commissions through our dashboard itself to require we you know push out
to market multiple different ways
that people can go ahead and stake Injective
and make sure we can do it across multiple different
kind of UX experiences,
but at the same time,
always coming through to our stack,
which is why I do believe supported
by some of the best technical guys in the market today.
I think it's a hell of a statement
that the Injective team is working so closely with teams that are providing security and providing tooling and providing resources to the ecosystem, right?
And I think it's also a statement of everybody here, right, our commitment to Injective.
Everybody's giving back in a meaningful way that is best suited to their skill set.
I think it's pretty incredible.
Kudos, everybody.
Thank you, guys.
Yeah, thanks, Eric.
I would agree.
And I would say the reason why we chose U3 to audit the ecosystem,
Injective Core, and the ecosystem dubs is that every auditor has specific expertise.
Starting from Informal, they obviously developed the consensus layer we're using,
and they've been part of the Column SDK since the beginning. And we work with them very closely.
Outside audits, of course, engineering work, consulting, developing our modules, and so on.
And going to Zalik, of course, one of the top auditors in the space, very experts on EVM, which will be very important
to inject it as we aspire to be a multi-VM chain on EVM and beyond. And then, of course,
ICV has a lot of experience with Cosmos and the Cosmos SDK. So obviously, we do a lot of audits
for the same piece of code, oftentimes two or three, depending on how critical something is.
And we work with everyone on different code bases.
But it's great to have the top players
on something specific that we're developing,
and we can kind of feel secure about that audit.
OK. Okay, and with that, I think we can move on to the next question. I know Kel and some others specifically run different businesses, lines of businesses
within their organization.
We'd love to hear more.
And also SCV, as they mentioned, they do proactive work.
So oftentimes they would reach out to us when something happened to a different ecosystem that could affect us.
So we'd love to hear, aside from doing audits specifically, if you have any other engagements and how does that relate to injective or other ecosystems.
Yeah, I can jump in there. So yeah, kind of like you alluded there. And like I mentioned before,
Yeah, I can jump in there.
most of the time, SCV security works behind the scenes. So we don't necessarily disclose
a ton of findings publicly. We do when it's possible and when it's relevant, but we are always proactively looking
and disclosing findings to the relevant party.
So during the past year, for example,
we discovered a few vulnerabilities with Injective Core.
They were properly addressed by the engineering teams.
It really feels awesome to be kind of
given the opportunity with SCB
and the Injective ecosystem
to proactively search for these bugs.
It's kind of one of our defining characteristics.
Our managing director, Vinny,
it has a serious reputation in Web 2 bug bounty hunting
and also Web 3, just disclosing many, many vulnerabilities, some of them that
most people haven't even been disclosed publicly.
But he's also the tech director, so he's really kind of set things up and given the auditors
and the security researchers a lot of the ability to pursue those those campaigns and
and kind of work together on bug bounties which is kind of unique I think
hey I uh I guess I'll give kind of our approach to how we look at audits at informal.
So we approach blockchain audits not really as a search for bugs, but as a more rigorous
evaluation of overall system behavior and edge cases in long-term resilience.
We build models and then define system invariants and engage closely with
engineering teams to ensure that the systems we audit are secure by design, not just convention.
And we do this using formal verification with Quint. If you're not familiar with Quint,
it's a next-generation specification language that helps to design, verify, and optimize any systems, originally inspired by TLA+.
We also do consensus engineering work.
We do this for a wide range of teams, including Injective for Comet BFT.
Eric, do you want me to jump in here about the audit set?
Yeah, please, would you?
Yeah.
I feel like you're best.
So we have been doing audits for Injective
for several years now.
I mean, as we said before,
we've audited the Injective core.
I believe it's Injective's policy
that they get at least two audits for every module they push we're in the set of audits for all of those modules
we we approach audits pretty differently from a lot of other firms
most of the people that we hire for audits, they come from a vulnerability research background.
So for me personally, the job that I had before me and Jazzy founded Zelleck was I hacked iPhones for a living. So I worked at a firm where we found, developed, weaponized,
and sell exploits to hack iPhones essentially by phone number. I was auditing iMessage code for like a few months straight,
that kind of stuff.
So it's all zero click.
So that's the background that everyone at Zelleck tends to come from.
We have people who have one point to own.
We have people who work on Chromium zero days.
So when we approach audits, it's more of like,
if we were going to try to hack this thing like North Korea did, how would we approach it?
I guess our goal is that we try to find all of the bugs and we don't miss any, obviously.
I think that's like a very reasonable standard to hold yourself to, but I don't know why not every audit firm holds themselves to this standard.
Granted, it's a human process, so sometimes not everything can be found.
But we find that it's, we tend to find much deeper bugs than most other firms.
bugs than most other firms.
I mean, we say that we have exceptional expertise
and a deep understanding of domain-specific and complex
code, but I think what really demonstrates that that is just
some of the bugs that we found in the past.
For example, we found a critical bug in the bycode verifier for the core move VM.
We found bugs in Solana's SPL.
They were going to do like a ZK thing,
and then that would let you mint infinite tokens.
Thankfully, we caught that before deployment.
But these are the types of bugs that we
find on a regular basis.
And we do so much work with Cosmos too.
I mean, we found, for example, a bug that can just halt near.
There's several of these that we're trying to disclose,
but the L won't let us disclose them.
Injective has been great to work with.
Every time we find a bug, they fix immediately,
and they don't try to brush it under the rug,
which is extremely commendable and honestly pretty rare in
the space.
So we really like working with objective and it's the reason
that we have deepened and continued our partnership with
them over this whole period. Eric, did I miss anything?
No, I think that was pretty comprehensive.
Yeah.
Should we move over to Kiln?
We'd love to hear about Kiln DeFi.
I know you guys are developing a bunch of products.
Yeah, absolutely. about kiln defi i know you guys are developing a bunch of products
uh yeah absolutely um more than happy to discuss kind of kill defy and what we're doing in that space um at the moment uh so alongside our staking as a service which has been the cornerstone of
our product offering for the last six or seven years uh we are kind of increasing our usage of different type of let's say d5 volts
and protocols and applications across multiple protocols so making it a way for our customers to
let's say one click be able to be the kind of center for their yield aggregation um across
whichever protocols that they're looking to utilize so what we get to do is we get to become
that aggregation layer that works across different,
let's say, specific devalue products
and allow them to kind of utilize their,
either let's say, maybe just native kind of tokens,
maybe even additional products such as LSTs for restaking directly into these applications
themselves. Now we can utilize this directly into different kind of wallet integrations with some of
the biggest wallets in the place they sell, such as Ledger or Trust Wallet, Safe,
we'd integrate directly with them and give them an opportunity to earn yield let's say across stable coins or other kind
of assets as well and this is something that is out to market today but it's just another way for
us to go ahead and give options within ecosystems that weren't available today really i think it
grows especially for institutional customers who are fully aware of,
let's say, the risks of staking, but want to kind of grow their exposure and interact more within
ecosystems such as Injective, which gives them far more kind of an understanding of the ecosystem.
Greater participation more than anything is what we really want to see, while also making sure they can kind of optimize rewards
across multiple applications.
So that's just one area that is greatly growing here at Kiln.
Perfect, thank you guys.
So we can move on to the next question.
What kind of key metrics do you look at
when you evaluate if the value of business
has been growing?
And are you happy on Interactive or other networks?
Is it delegators?
Is it a total stake?
Is it a combination of the two?
And how do you feel about half-time affecting these decisions from delegators and how you intend to improve that?
Eric, do you have any thoughts here?
Yeah, absolutely.
We're always reassessing our infrastructural setups
to determine whether it's moving things like
forecook setups or whatever closer to reduce latency,
improve uptime, improve the actual hardware
that the nodes themselves are deployed on.
It's a constant kind of reassessment.
It's not a kind of reassessment.
It's not a stand it up, deploy it,
and then we walk away. Right. I think that's,
I think that's obvious from everybody here is engagement with the ecosystem.
Right. We all take a pretty different or not different,
but a unique approach in constant reinvestment in the ecosystem. Right. We do that from soup to nuts, right? Both with our auditing work and, of course,
our assessment of our infrastructural deployments.
So that's a key focus for us right now.
But, yeah.
I think that was a really good overview, Eric.
Like, any high-quality validator on the injective set knows
we're constantly tinkering.
Like you said,
it's not a set it and forget it. I know our team over here is constantly looking to upgrade our
hardware, changing geo distribution, evaluating all the metrics on chain, and really seeing where
we can push uptime. As far as how we evaluate our delegators or the amount of stake and what we see as being successful, I think the two key metrics there are the total amount of stake and then the number of delegators.
Like if you're attracting a fair number of delegators, it looks like you're doing something right on chain and providing a quality service. But outside of that, I think we look at overall uptime as being the
number one parameter for a quality validator, especially when you look at it over a longer
time horizon, like, you know, one, two, three years, being able to keep up with changes on
the validator set and changes in the software. Yeah.
Yeah, totally, totally agree with that.
Yeah, I'll just, I don't want to rehash any of the other points made because obviously that's what we're looking at too.
And those are very relevant across the whole validator set.
And I think that they're awesome, awesome points to point out.
And just also really want to point out that,
yeah, the whole,
like all the validators here
are constantly evaluating like the infrastructure
to provide the best services to the delegators.
I think just to add some other metrics
that we focus on.
So SCV is securing approximately $50 million of injective assets delegated to us.
We have approximately $150 million in delegation across all chains.
And then we really focus on, yeah, the security of our infrastructure and then the uptime.
So we're near 100% in the last 10,000 blocks.
And also, yeah, just like the consistency over time.
And I think one other thing just to kind of add something new to the discussion is that,
yeah, Injective provides, is a really cool like proving ground for validators just because of the fast block times.
Yeah, the block times on Injective are pretty fast, so it provides a unique challenge.
And also just, yeah, it really helps these validators like bake out their processes.
Yeah, just the infrastructure and improve across both the Injective ecosystem and also the other networks that they validate.
Yeah, I can completely agree with everything that's already been said when we are kind of reassessing our infrastructure for Injective.
As Eric already mentioned, you can't just kind of set it and sit.
We constantly reassess where we are. Uptime is always going to be the metric that matters a lot
to us and we often see that is just completely in line with how many delegators we will get,
just how much uptime we are and it's always been good. So that was very proud of here at Kiln as well.
We always find work as well when we are looking
with a foundation that we have a lot of trust with,
such as injectives, to make sure that we provide tooling
that allows us to reduce any of that kind of downtime as well.
We do have a Cosmos data watcher as open source
that allows us to kind of reduce the amount of time time
and blocks missed.
And this is something we always kind of provide back out to the community if we're doing something well and
we can provide that out as open source we always will do so always looking at key metrics and also
creating tooling that will kind of help the entire ecosystem not just ourselves, be better at testing these blocks.
Thanks, everyone. Yeah, I just want to quickly touch upon what Matt said.
It is very important to kind of take up time
on a longer horizon because many times, you know,
you might go on the dashboard and see that the uptime might not
be perfect for validator, but it could be the case that the provider they're using
might have a glitch for an hour
that only happens in a few months,
or maybe that the node is being maintained.
So it's really important to kind of look at app time
over weeks, for months, through time,
and how well somebody performs.
And-
And that's why we have diversity of validators, isn't that right?
It's very, it provides more redundancy to the network,
more resilience and more decentralization.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Absolutely.
And I know Eric and Matt touched upon, you know,
who cracks and how redundancy works
and would love, you know, security and slashing to be a final question.
I know Matt from Informal kind of designed everything on the engineering side of things, so maybe we can start with him.
But how should a validator design the system to ensure slashing doesn't happen or has very, very low probability of happening?
very, very low probability of happening and what software is available to use.
And what software is available to use?
Oh, geez, I think I need to clarify a bit here.
I'm on the biz dev side of things at Informal, so I don't have my lead engineer in the call today.
So to get into exactly how our systems are built out and designed for redundancy,
I'd be doing a disservice to our lead engineer, I think.
No worries, no worries.
That's all right.
Yeah, Matt.
So essentially for any of our setups that require it, typically Cosmos-based stuff,
we use Horcrux, which is a key management system that basically distributes your signing
keys out to ensure that they're always live.
So if one server goes down, they're always live, right?
So if one server goes down, the others are live and they could pick it up.
This, I mean, also there's built-in mechanisms to ensure that there's no double signing.
Obviously, this has happened in the past, but Horcrux is pretty much the industry standard there.
And we're constantly monitoring all of our setups to ensure that liveness again retooling
redeploying or moving infrastructure and ensure low latency um we're investigating some other key
management systems as well things like cubist etc etc that are hardware back um you know ensuring
that the funds that are delegate to us are secure protected right i mean that's core to our mission
really at Zalik
is finding all the bugs, saving all the money, right?
Protecting the folks in the ecosystem,
whether they be those foundations, these labs entities,
or whether they're the community.
Yeah, it's a pretty substantial setup there.
You know, again, Horcrux,
it's a three system configuration, right?
We distributed across geographic areas.
We've got some custom tooling we built out for monitoring this stuff.
Yeah, I mean, that's the long and short of it is ensuring we've got industry standard setups and we're always on the bleeding edge of ensuring that our infrastructure is as secure as possible.
Yeah, and the validator keys, the root keys, they're actually a multi-sig, and all parts
of the multi-sig are hardware wallets held by different team members, geographically distributed.
So that's another angle of security that provides operational overhead for us, but provides
ultimately more security for the network that you guys enjoy. Yeah.
ultimately more security for the network that you guys enjoy.
Yeah.
Yeah. As far as key management goes,
it's something that I think all of us take really seriously.
Like we use a HashiCorp vault here at informal and yeah,
all of our ledgers are distributed across our team as well.
Yeah. That's awesome to hear.
Yeah, and everyone, especially, everyone on this call is security focused and heavy onto the security side of the validator ops.
And just to add, I guess, a bit on the SCV side of things,
like in addition to the, yeah,
the fault-tolerant infrastructure monitoring,
some of the custom monitoring we have in-house,
SCV also has a slashing fund.
So when you delegate to SCV,
you're automatically eligible for the slashing fund
in case of the rare event of a slash.
So I just wanted to point that out.
Like we are still at the end of the day dealing with software here.
And it's good to have kind of a backup case.
If there was a slashing event.
That's really impressive.
How big is the slashing fund?
I don't know numbers off the top of my head.
I'm more on the audit side of things. Vinny, our tech director has set up the slashing fund um i don't know numbers off the top of my head um i'm more on the audit side of things
vinny our tech director um has set up the slashing fund but um do you guys do you guys have insurance
because like i think almost every validator operator has been trying to buy insurance but then
no insurance carrier actually wants to i'd have to circle up with with vinny on that just so i don't
give any any false information out on the space.
But you can also hit him up directly as a DM if you guys want to kind of circle back and get some more details.
Yeah.
Yeah, I...
Sorry, go ahead. Go ahead, please.
Yeah, sure. No, no, I was just going to kind of finalize on that kind of last point as well.
So for us, not gonna probably dive into,
let's say the key management practices.
I think they're all kind of the same
and up to a very high level,
but definitely in a format of kind of insurance
that are slashing here at Kiln.
We are insured, we have slashing coverage,
chain proof, which is insured by Munich Re,
and also professional indemnity,
and cybersecurity breaches as well, coverage.
So that's an area that is kind of a high expectation
from the customers that we do expect
to go ahead and delegate through us
from these financial institutions.
So that's an area that we've kind of locked down
due to customer demand
yeah i wanted to touch on the key management piece uh one last time i think it's really
important um we've seen so many breaches happen over the last 12 months due to operational security
or opsec issues um the bybit hack comes to mind and actually uh do a bunch of OPSEC audits for our clients.
So we obviously do the same procedures internally on our own
operational procedures.
Just to make sure that all the keys are happy and they're happy
place all the time.
Yeah, great points to To touch on the insurance, I've spoken with a lot of outdators and providers
who would be offering insurance. And the consensus is that there's a possibility that there's
a double sign event and obviously the slashing there would be huge. This has never happened
in the set, but there's just this
possibility that they have to account for and so in most of the cases it becomes way more expensive
to buy insurance um and you know instead of paying soft slashing which would be way way lower
yeah that's been the experience for us too i mean sometimes the the slashing rates for
double signing on most networks are set at like double digit percentages of the
of the principle right if you have like hundreds million dollars delegated as an insurance carrier
how do you how do you ensure that it's there no way to price that risk too, because it's such a weird tail risk and
validators are new as a concept because the insurance industry moves so incredibly slowly.
Yeah.
Yeah, I agree.
I would say there's no reason to be that high.
I think maybe it's something that was said years ago.
We actually changed that from 5% to 0.5% a while back.
But if you guys want to, we could lower even more. We actually changed that from 5% to 0.5% a while back.
But if you guys want to, we could lower even more. I think generally, if that happens,
the node is tombstone, right?
So they can't even join the set again.
And I think that's punishment enough
because they can't do it again
because they're no longer in the set.
So I don't think the slashing percentage matters
at that point,
because at the end of the day, the foundation is said that we have at least, and I think
many other networks are, you know, well known businesses, who, you know, if something happens,
it would be unintentional.
Right? Yeah, I think that's a very forward looking and progressive approach. I think
like the super high double signing slashing percentages are pretty archaic.
And I think they're a holdover from the time when it was like, we think it's all very PVP.
But I think given the fact that validator sets are usually now highly trusted individuals or even institutions,
I think this is probably the path forward in the long-term future.
It also just leads to to more efficient network.
Lower block times and foreign for a network like injective, which has such fast block times, which is such high throughput.
You kind of need that right?
Yep, agreed.
OK, thank you, everyone.
This has been very fruitful.
Now I'll pass on to Rocky.
Yeah, yeah, appreciate everyone kind of chiming in on those questions.
Hopefully for the audience here, that gives you guys kind of a look behind the scenes a little bit to the various validators here on the panel.
the various validators here on the panel.
And, you know, obviously we'd love to see some more sort of inactive and idle delegations
flow to these types of validators, right, that are committed, that have, you know, thought
through the security side and sort of everything in between.
So we will be moving to the community Q&A.
So if you are in the audience and you want to ask a question,
in your bottom left corner, just go ahead and request to speak.
And we'll bring you up here on stage.
This is the fun part.
I guess this is the fun part.
You are right, Eric.
Yes, sir.
And while we wait for people to start requesting,
I guess if there's any other sort of topic or sort of question that didn't get asked or you wanted addressed, you know, happy to do that now while we wait for the
requesters to speak.
Matt, Jorbs, SCVv where are you guys based
is that directed at me
hell yeah everybody uh so the majority of our valet air team is based in canada um kind of
spread out uh myself hell yeah yeah myself i'm in satchewan, so kind of in the middle of nowhere.
But a large part of our team is around the Toronto area.
And we also have some of our team across the USA from New York all the way to Montana.
But informal systems overall is all over the world.
Totes, yeah.
I mean, we also have geographic distributions,
so we can have time zone coverage for 24-7 coverage
for incidents and stuff.
Nice.
Yeah, we have a lot in US-Canada.
I love Canada, dude.
It's such a great country every time I visit.
Yeah, yeah.
SCV is also pretty distributed.
Our managing director, Vinny, is in Australia.
We have a number of people in Asia, some people in Europe, and then I'm in the US.
Yeah, I'm a Minnesotan, so I'm a junior Canadian.
Junior Canadian? Yeah verified canada enjoyer
uh does minnesota share a border it does right yeah yeah we sure do i always get up in the summer
up to the boundary waters which is i've accidentally illegally crossed the border a couple times
this is being recorded trail yeah well what are well, what are you going to do?
Who's going to Injective Summit?
I'm looking forward to it.
That sounds slit.
It's going to be dope.
It's going to be dope.
I'm excited.
June 26th, right?
Right after Permissionless.
It's a good time to be in New York.
We'll see you there.
Duh.
Eric, if you're ever looking for side work,
we could definitely use some more shills here.
Hey, man.
You got to hit the lines, right?
You got to hit the lines.
I thought we were already shilling Injective.
I'm so sad.
It's okay. We're always down to do more.
We love you guys.
That's a fact.
That's a fact.
I appreciate that. Anybody out there that's uh in
the space right now that has some questions hop up hit that yeah yeah hop on hop on the mic hop
on the mic we did have one um let's see are they on stage yet let's see we've had a couple that
have requested so um okay we have our first uh here. Big G, if you want to ask your question, go for it.
Okay, GM, GM Injective, GM everyone.
I've been on the listener section, you know, listening to everything you guys have been saying,
and it's quite insightful. So I want to ask, apart from the sticking on the validator pools,
what other benefits does one stand to aid
from sticking on these validator pools?
Hope I'm audible.
Eric, I think, yeah.
Yeah, happy to do it.
You know, so like Rocky and Achilles indicated, right,
from, I think it's from May 27th to July 27th,
essentially, you delegate to any of these four validators, right,
Zalik, Kiln, Informal Systems, SCV,
you basically, it's commission-free, right? It's commission-free. So that normal take that the validators would claim against those new delegations,
those will actually be refunded to you at the end of the period. And again, like I said earlier,
a delegation to Zelleck after that time is essentially an investment directly back into
the injective ecosystem, the security of the ecosystem, because we turn around and share back those rewards that we earn
from that injective validator as audit credits for the injective team to spend on, again,
their core developments or for those ecosystem projects, again, like Trufin, like DojoSwap,
et cetera, to have lower cost audits for them, whether that's at Zell at Core or at our new team Zenith
or at Code Arena as well.
Yeah, across any of our products, platforms.
I mean, our philosophy is that
a lot of foundations,
they have to basically choose between like,
okay, do I want to get this shipped quickly?
Do I want to ship this now
or do you want to get it shipped securely?
And we think that's like a choice
that foundations shouldn't have to make because I mean they have users and the users want their
money to be safe so we think that foundations um if they're you know in the business of also
selecting validators we think it's a pretty straightforward idea that like well if you let
us validate then you no longer have to make that choice. There's no longer a dilemma.
You get to have now and save. It's like instead of picking
and choosing which parts should we audit this, we want them to
build this audit everything. That's that's our goal here.
OK, thank you very much for that. I think you guys did justice
to my question. Thank you very much for having. I think you guys did justice to my question. Thank you very much for having me.
No, thank you for asking.
I appreciate it, Big G. We do have one other up here on stage. Lebo, how are you doing?
Hey guys, what's up? Sorry if there's a little noise in the background currently at the gym but my question is obviously with
the campaign starting you're gonna have a lot of validators and some of the
known well-known values we're gonna have new ones like we have right now what
would you what will your tips be for someone who's going to decide between
each validator so what what would be the things you look for before you set your inch for a specific validator?
I think that you want to look for a long track record of quality service, so that comes down to uptime.
The other thing you want to look for is community contribution. So we have a good set of validators in this call right now that have all demonstrated how they're contributing to Injective directly.
And it just shows a more standing commitment to the network rather than extractionary.
And I think that's important when you're looking to, especially if you're looking to long-term stake and you want to be supporting Injective overall?
I think that's a great answer.
Another very common heuristic that I've seen people use,
I personally myself am guilty of this,
is they just choose the number one validator
and they just said and forget it.
As the number one validator by voting power on Injective,
I support that choice.
Wow, I didn't know that. That's crazy.
I would have never guessed.
Yeah, I would say also as a rule of thumb,
you can distribute the stake across multiple validators.
We went through what validators were doing,
at least top quality in this call and many others to kind of prevent slashing.
But in case it happens,
you could have a distribution across,
you know, two or three kind of reduce
what happens then.
But yeah, I mean, if I were in your shoes,
I would consider the approach people take
when it comes to editing,
because as you heard,
it's kind of like a very unique fridge.
And then I'm just my favorite and go with it. Yeah, I think it's kind of like, I think kind of like a very unique fridge. And then I'll choose my favorite and go with it.
Yeah, I think it's kind of like, I think everyone here runs a very tight shit, by the way.
Just to be very clear, like, I have a lot of respect for all the other validators.
I think they're all really good.
I think it comes down to, like, choosing your favorite Spice girl.
Is that reference, like, dating me?
It's like, is that making me look old?
What are we then, Luna?
Are we Sporty Spice?
We're doing the Bellatro mile.
I'm out here hoisting.
The Bellatro.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
So wait, do you guys know what the Bellatro mile?
No, you guys.
Nobody knows what that is, Luna.
You made it up.
So I run a mile every day just to stay fit.
But then I've been doing this challenge where you have to do a Bellatro mile, which is you
have to beat Blatro,
but also running a mile in real life.
I find that Plasma deck works really well.
That's amazing.
So I just want to follow up with that.
So in your opinions,
there is basically a better Validator than the other, correct? Like ultimately there's going to be like the best validators that most people choose. So why would someone want to choose maybe a smaller validator? Or why would someone want to contribute to a smaller one? Because it looks like it seems like most people would want to choose maybe the safest and maybe not as rewarding but again the safest because we are
in crypto and everybody wants to just be safe so why would someone choose maybe a smaller account
validator well i think it's like it depends on like what your personal preferences are right
like for example and or example like it also can be based on vibes i think like a lot of people
might like be choosing one validator, but you might like another one just
because like you really like the their vibe, you really like
their tweets or their philosophy or you like the security work
that they do or you like how they approach like uptime or
like contributing to the community, this and that. Or
you might like the fact that they have like a higher
commission rate or the they have like a higher commission rate or they have
like a better uptime, right?
There's like a lot of factors that go into it.
And like Achilles said, you can distribute your stake across multiple delegations to
different validators, which spreads out your risk and decreases your variance.
Yeah, I think with smaller validators, they have to have a really unique value prop, right?
Like when you go with a larger validator that has long-term demonstrated security, you know what you're getting.
I think to choose a smaller validator, you really have to look into what their value prop is to the ecosystem
and evaluate it from that standpoint
as well on top of the quality of service that they're providing.
And there is small validators out there that are able to do that.
It's a lot more difficult and involves a lot more research on delegators' part.
Yeah, and also if there's a smaller validator, sometimes you can just talk to them because
they tend to be smaller teams.
They're easy to get in touch with and you can meet new people that way.
I'd love to hear from the delegators we have here that have chosen validators about why they or how they went about selecting their validator.
I think we've done a lot of dictating with how we think delegators should choose.
And I'd like to hear some feedback
about why people have made their choice to date.
That's a great idea.
Let's do that.
Liebel, you're still on stage.
Is that something you can comment on?
Well, I remember when I first joined Injective
about a year ago,
well, a little bit more than a year ago, like almost two years actually. I remember when I first joined Injective about a year ago, well, a little bit
more than a year ago, like almost two years, actually. I remember just choosing Everstake
and Citadel. Honestly, I chose it because word of mouth was like the most safest. Also,
most of my friends chose those. The reward has been okay, but I went with them because,
again, like I said, most people told me like it was the most secure. They felt the most safe.
Also, I think Citadel was like top three, I believe. Ever it was the most secure. They felt the most safe. Also, I think Cidad was top three, I believe.
Every six, top five.
And the downtime, they had really respectable downtimes.
I just went with those because, like I said, I felt the safest.
And most of my friends told me.
So a lot of times, I think people are swayed by what, obviously, their friends say.
and say. But to this day, it's been nothing but great from both stake and validators.
But to this day, it's been nothing but great from both stake and validators.
There you go. Heard from the horse's mouth. I think that's a pretty good testimony on
sort of what goes through people's minds when they evaluate the different validators.
I do see we are at time, you guys. So I think we're going to have to put a pause on our conversation today.
But I super enjoyed this conversation.
I thought there was some great insights.
And I guess for everyone in the audience, if you did miss earlier comments, definitely feel free to watch this or I should say listen to it after the fact.
And we'll also be putting this up on our YouTube channel for,
you know, further watching and further, you know, listening to in the future. So with that being
said, I do want to thank, you know, each of our four validators up here, SCV, Kiln, Informal,
and Zellick for being here. You guys rock. You know, it's been a pleasure working with y'all.
And let's keep the momentum going.
Let's keep these delegations flowing.
And with that, you know, appreciate everyone being here and we will catch you on the next
spaces.
Thanks for having us.
Thanks for having us.
Thanks, everyone.
Pleasure to hang out with y'all today.
Thanks, guys.
Yeah, pleasure.
Let's build a great network together
hell yeah yeah hell yeah all right see you guys cheers y'all Thank you.
