[Validator Introduction] Chorus One

Hi everyone,

I wanted to kickstart this part of the forum by introducing Chorus One as a Centrifuge validator to the community.

First a bit of background:
We have been following Centrifuge since 2018, when parts of the team in Berlin were working out of the Full Node co-working space, in which two of our team members (Brian and me) also reside (at least in pre-corona times). From the start, we were convinced of both the vision and the team’s capability to execute on it. We have had many conversations around Centrifuge, the token model, and the staking and validation ecosystem in general, so when plans to launch Centrifuge’s own Substrate blockchain became more concrete, we didn’t hestitate to join the validator program!

Now, let’s get a bit into who we are and what we aim to contribute to the Centrifuge ecosystem. Chorus One is a fully remote, Swiss-based startup focused on staking services and validation infrastructure. We were among the first teams to focus on the opportunity of operating infrastructure for decentralized networks, ultimately seeking to help token holders to participate, earn rewards, and help them shape the network they are invested in.

We believe that the validator role goes beyond purely operating infrastructure required to continuously and securely participate in consensus to receive staking rewards. We started out as one of the genesis validators on Cosmos and have since been active in protocol design decisions, governance discussions, tooling for validators and delegators, and generating awareness and educating the space about networks we are working with. We see ourselves as part of the network’s ecosystem and aim to contribute in any way that helps the success of the protocols we support.

Some more details about us:

We are a known, long-term operator of Proof-of-Stake validators: We are currently live on Cosmos, Terra, Kava, and Chainlink. We have been providing >99% uptime on all networks we are operating on and our delegators have entrusted us with assets valued at over $12m at the time of writing. We charge competitive fees, details for Centrifuge will be available at launch.

Infrastructure and Jurisdiction: We are a Swiss AG and our infrastructure is hosted across multiple jurisdictions for redundancy (bare metal in UK&US, cloud across the globe). Our terms of service can be found here. Full details on our infrastructure can be found here.

Tooling and Content: We are a well-known brand in the ecosystem with a long history of creating public content (e.g. on our blog or podcast). We are also building tools to help validators and delegators (e.g. Anthem, our staking platform focused on providing historical reward data, and Solana StrongGate, an open-source protocol we develop for high-availability validation on Solana.

Support: You can reach us 24/7 through our website via Intercom (https://chorus.one), email (hello at chorus.one) and on Telegram (Telegram: Contact @ChorusOne).

Looking forward to the launch of Centrifuge’s mainnet and to Radial nominations of our validators!

All the best,
Felix

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Hey Felix, thanks for the kickoff post.
It’s nice to see that Chorus One is also focused on ecosystem. I’m looking forward to learning more about your team as well as the other validators!

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Hi @FelixLts : This looks like a great setup you have there!

Do you offer any kind of (legal) protection against slashing loss? E.g. are you insured against hardware failure or anything of sorts and would reimburse nominators if the slashing cause was not an event outside of your possible control?

Thanks for clarifying & kind regards

Hi, thanks!

This is a topic we are actively looking into! At the moment, we do not have an insurance in the traditional sense (I also do not think there is any provider that would cover this kind of risk as of now).

Currently, we would evaluate such an event on a case by case basis and, depending on the severity and our role in it, do our best to make our delegators whole. So far, we haven’t suffered a single slashing event on any network in over 2 years of operation.

As we and the staking industry overall grows, I believe it is likely we will be setting up some kind of “insurance fund”. I also believe there will be on-chain insurance protocols (some are already emerging on Ethereum), which that fund and/or our delegators themselves could then use to insure against these kind of risks.

Kind regards,
Felix

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