Decentralized Nodes: Polkadotters

Ecosystem
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Hello Polkadot community,

We’re a globally-oriented validator group committed to advancing decentralization, both geographically and technologically, within the Polkadot ecosystem. Below you’ll find a summary of our validator operations and wider activities relevant to technical peers and program committees.

Node Infrastructure & Decentralization Focus

  • We prioritize decentralized infrastructure. Our Kusama validators’ machines currently operate from Singapore to strengthen geographic spread. As part of our IBP participation, we also operate a dedicated server in New Zealand where we run public RPC endpoints for the ecosystem. This helps strengthen the global and regional resilience of the network.

  • We have been active system chain collators since the very start—we were among the first to run collators for system parachains, supporting network stability and driving adoption.

  • We test emerging clients such as Kagome, contributing to testnets and providing early feedback on technical issues (recent example: reporting a memory leak to Kagome’s core developers).

  • Our team ensures OS and application-level updates are timely:

    • OS-critical patches via unattended upgrades.
    • Application/client releases are tracked using GitHub and Matrix (1KV Announcements), with controlled, manual updates using an Ansible workflow.

Security & Monitoring

  • Security Policy: SSH hardened (keys-only authentication, no root login, strict firewall via UFW, Fail2Ban, minimal open ports), session keys only on live nodes, no extraneous software.

  • Monitoring: Using Prometheus and Node Exporter (secured by Nginx plus firewall), all metrics feed into a private Grafana server. Alerts push directly to our Telegram and Discord for real-time response.

  • We maintain manual failover backup nodes (no equivocation risk); all session keys are rotated and handled responsibly.

Sysadmin & Technical Experience

  • Our lead sysadmin has 12 years’ backend experience (JVM, Python) and a 3-year tenure at Red Hat, with certifications like RHCSA and a BSc in Computer Science.

Community & OpenGov Engagement

  • Active OpenGov participants: Pilot cohort of Decentralized Voices (DV), currently DV delegates (4th cohort) within Permanence DAO—one of the most active voters and contributors to governance.

  • In Permanence DAO, we contribute feedback and mentoring in OpenGov forums, and help proposers and community members with both technical and governance issues.

Ecosystem Contributions

  • We are long-time, reliable partners of the IBP—our public RPC endpoints in New Zealand enhance ecosystem accessibility, redundancy, and local decentralization, frequently being among the first regional endpoints available to users and developers.

  • Run 6 Paseo testnet validators and multiple system chain collators.

  • Regular technical contributions (PRs, issue reporting and comments) to substrate, polkadot, cumulus, and open-runtime-module-library repos. Sample 1 | Sample 2

  • Authored public post-mortems and monitoring guides for validator peers (example)

  • Run >400 educational articles, weekly roundups, and maintain active social channels.

Outreach and DAOs

  • Founding members of DOT Validator Alliance and active participants in United Bloc, IBP, and Permanence DAO.

  • Operating a nomination pool with engagement-driven community outreach.

Reliability & Philosophy

  • No slashing records—track record reflects resilience, adaptability, and focus on redundancy/HS.

  • We consider voting and engaging in OpenGov as fundamental parts of validator responsibility, and actively encourage other validators to do the same.

We’re always open for technical discussion, validator best practices sharing, and continue testing new nodes, environments, and clients to ensure Polkadot remains diverse and reliable.

For any details, visit our X profile, you can also DM @pmensik:matrix.org or contact us through our public channels.

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