Introducing RadUp.io

Validator Name - RadUp.io
Validator Address - rv1q2twzsq2eqd9et4lnh745k0r7heqp2d2maj57sh5eswj2rdrjex250d832l
Fees: 1.95%

Website

Contact Details

Languages
English

About Me/Us
We are Ed and James, two long-time friends (10+ years, but who is counting?!) with a multi year interest in crypto, and more recently Radix and Defi. We both started dabbling in the crypto world in 2014, and found out about Radix in 2017 and have followed the project closely in the years since. We both participated in the ICO, and are vocal advocates for Radix within our personal networks.

Our interest in running a node on Radix stemmed from a desire to help the Radix network and community by providing an independent, trusted and well run node operated not by a faceless corporation, but by committed members of the community. During the period in which Radix is limited to 100 nodes, we consider it really important from a decentralisation perspective that community nodes dominate the list. We don’t think it is inevitable that corporate heavyweights (e.g. AllNodes, Forbole, and in the fullness of time exchanges) dominate the Radix network.

We are committing to this as a joint project to ensure greater resilience of our node. We are both well equipped to undertake any necessary maintenance or undertake mitigations in the event of any network or infrastructure failures, and ensuring we have two people with these administrator capabilities reduces the risk of a single point of failure and key man risk. If one of us is travelling and potentially out of contact, then it’s highly likely the other is available in the event that active management of our nodes is required to mitigate any issues.

Validator Infrastructure
We always run a minimum of two independent and fully synced nodes on the network. These are maintained on different infrastructure providers on different continents.

Our validator node tends to be hosted in Tokyo, Japan. We made the conscious decision to run the server in an area of the world with comparatively poor coverage when looking at the location of Radix nodes on the network, because decentralisation is important and this is an easy way to strengthen the network. Our backup is located in London.

Experience
Prior to node running on Radix, we came with experience of remotely running VPN servers and Bitcoin nodes on AWS and DigitalOcean instances, as well as running Tor nodes on local servers. We ran a validator node on Radix testnet for the duration of the test, learnt a lot, and apply this knowledge to the nodes we run on mainnet.

Why should delegators stake to your validator?
By staking to RadUp, you are supporting independent node operators. Our personal XRD are all staked to RadUp, so quite literally we are putting our own money where our mouth is.

Our fee of 1.95% is fair, and we have committed to not raise this beyond current levels certainly before the launch of Babylon, and beyond that only if market conditions and the fees charged by other nodes were to change significantly.

We run quarterly prize draws, see here for more details.

We have a policy of engagement and openness when it comes to supporting community initiatives. For example, we recently provided 5k XRD to the organisers of #scrypto-class-of-2022 to encourage participation and engagement with their excellent initiative.

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