[Validator Introduction] Binary Holdings

[will]

hey all, my name is Will and I’m the “Master of Validators” at Parity Technologies, and a co-founder of Binary Holdings. We run validators across a handful of networks in Polkadot, Kusama, Cosmos, and other ecosystems. I gave a bit longer of an intro in my council intro post, but the tl;dr is I help coordinate everyone running validators and infrastructure in the Polkadot/Kusama ecosystem. This includes helping independant third party validators (including many of the ones running the cfg chain), as well as exchanges, crypto funds, wallets, and more.

We have two Centrifuge nodes, each with 3% commission (no plans to raise this):

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4h45pmjmSVHdZFi8Qhmdpc9idaQcAqU5K6gh6tDZWme1hgUf

There’s a handful of optimizations we run things with, so nominating us could result in more rewards compared to other validators

Our machines are dedicated bare metal servers with Intel Xeon E-2274G (8) @ 4.900GHz chips, 32GB memory, and nvme drives. We have 1Gbps bandwidth. These are well above the specs for Standard Hardware that everyone running substrate nodes needs to have at this point. This ensures that the network is running well (and also helps maximize era points and rewards ).

We strategically placed our nodes in London to ensure further decentralization of the Centrifuge network, as no one else is currently running nodes there.

We lovingly and tenderly manage our keys, as to ensure to never get slashed (I’ve seen just about every possible reason people have so far gotten slashed on Polkadot / Kusama / Parachains).

We compile our binaries ourselves with various optimizing flags in order to get the best performance possible.

We’ve set up our monitoring stack with Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, and Pager duty, as to be alerted for any downtime. We additionally have some custom made chain indexing scrapers for some additional book keeping and metrics. Our monitoring cluster is in a private network that our nodes are connected to (with our nodes having multiple considerations for balancing running a p2p network and locking things down).

All our reward claiming is also automated, so rewards are available the next block after they’re available.

We look forward to you staking with us

[karson]

Hi,Will.I choose to support you. I have added both node addresses to my validator. I want to ask if I will be repeatedly charged for commissions?

[will]

Hi @karson, it might be helpful to explain a bit on how staking and rewards work (and how commission plays a part of this). The short version is that the comission is charged every era, in this case since our commission is 3%, 3% of a nominator’s total rewards is the fee our validator takes for our services. Each nominator gets 97% of their rewards for their tokens.

The long version is as follows:

In substrate based networks that use the default staking paradigms (Kusama, Polkadot, Centrifuge), staking rewards are a bit dynamic and are affected by a few different parameters. There isn’t a fixed amount of rewards that go to everyone, so that’s why it’s a bit important to stake with validators that have things properly set up.

Every era (24 hours), there is a an amount of total tokens that gets split between all the validators. (as of the last era, this amount was 35,676 CFG). This amount gets split roughly equally, but not exactly. It’s distributed to validators based on the amount of Era Points they earn. They will earn era points generally for things like producing blocks, and doing general validator services. Validators that have things properly set up (especially those that optimize things like we do), will earn slighly higher era points, which results in higher rewards for nominatiors. At the end of every era, that total amount of tokens I first mentioned gets distributed to validators based on how many era points they have in relation to how many era points all validators have. (so if the total availabe tokens is 500 tokens, and a validator has 100 era points, and the total amount of every points between every one is 1000, they will earn 100/1000, or 1/10th of the total reward available for that era, or 50 tokens of that 500).

Once that reward is available to validators (say 50 tokens per the previous example), it is distributed to everyone that makes up the total stake of the validator based on how much of their stake makes up the total stake of the validator. First though, the commission is taken out as a fee for everyone. So say for example a validator charges 1% commission, of those 50 tokens, 0.5 tokens first gets distributed to the validator, and the rest of the 49.5 tokens is distributed to everyone based on the total stake.

If the validator has a total stake of 300 tokens, and a nominator has contributed to 30 tokens of that, they will earn 10% of the total avaiable reward. So they would earn 10% of the remaining 49.5 tokens of rewards, and thus get a reward of 4.95 tokens.

It’s important for nominators to choose validators that have a minimal total stake if they want to maximize their rewards, as a nominator’s tokens will make up a larger amount of their total stake in that case and earn more rewards.

If someone that has 30 tokens nominates someone that has 600 tokens total staked vs someone that has 300 tokens total staked, they will earn half of the rewards they otherwise would get. There are many validators right now that have 2x, 3x, or even 4x, the total stake, meaning nominators that choose those other validators will be earning as little as 1/4th of the rewards they can otherwise be getting! It’s very important for nominators to re-visit their nominations often, as they can be currently earning fractions of what they could be earning. Additionally many validators right now charge 10% commission (over 3x what we charge), meaning nominators that choose those validators will be earning a lot less than they otherwise could be getting.

I work at Parity on the staking ecosystem and help maximize the amount of rewards for Parity and the Web 3 Foundations staked holdings, so I think about these things quite often. Happy to elaborate on more things if you or anyone has questions about these kinds of things.

[Tjure07]

Hi Will!

I checked out your validator node in the Polkadot.js portal. Any reason why the amount of “own stake” is quite low compared to other validators?

0.9999 CFG

Thanks.

[will]

Hi @Tjure07,

Two reasons: 1.) Our main funds are in a separate account that has vesting 2.) We have two nodes, so we want to use that vesting account to nominate both of them.

Managing funds from an external nominator account usually is easier since moving ‘stake’ around can be done by changing nominations, instead of having to bond and unbond from validator stashes (and waiting the 28 days).