We have been able to create reliable, well-secured and technically correctly configured nodes that are resistant to intrusions from hackers and inspire confidence among our contributors.
Why to stake your tokens?
By staking your tokens on our validator nodes (by delegating them to us) you receive passive income, and our nodes, in turn, use these tokens (coins) to verify incoming transactions and connect blocks in the network.
In addition, we offer the lowest fees for our services among the validating companies.
Questions & Answers
Staking tokens earns significant rewards but is not risk-free. Tokens delegated to a validator can be partially slashed if the validator misbehaves. Slashing means the delegated tokens are forfeited (burned) without the possibility of recovery. On the Cosmos Hub, two attributable faults can lead to slashing events for the delegated tokens:
- Slashing by 0.01% can occur if the validator is offline for too long. Uptime is achieved when the validator signs at least 500 out of the last 10.000 blocks. If a validator does not sign minimum 500 blocks out of the last 10.000, a downtime slash occurs.
- Slashing by 5% can occur if the validator signs two different blocks at the same height (double-signing). This fault is harder to anticipate, resulting from bad operation practices or outright malicious intent from the validator operator.
When you delegate your tokens to a validator, select a trusted validator to prevent slashing from these faults.
By delegating your tokens, you help secure the network. You get part of the rewards provided by the protocol for this assistance. If you are planning to hold on to particular tokens for some time, delegating will help you accumulate more of these while contributing to the health of the network.
You are not giving away ownership of your tokens by delegating. As a validator, SkySKipper will never have the ability to move your tokens.
Undelegating (also called unbonding or unstaking) can be done anytime. However, it takes until the end of the current epoch (from 24 hours and up to 21 days depending on the project) to undelegate and become transferable.
We charge 10% from the block rewards received by our delegators. For example, if a delegator receives 100 tokens as a reward, SkySkipper will receive 10 tokens while the delegator will get 90 tokens.
Security
SkySkipper uses the best renowed practices in the tech world to ensure a secure and solid validator. To achieve that, we carry out a number of security actions, such as:
– we make sure that our software and OS are always up-to-date,
– only the necessary minimum of software is running on our server,
– we close ports that aren’t strictly needed,
– we constantly monitor for suspicious activity and immidiately ban any attempts to connect unauthorized to our server,
– we use DELL server only colocated in a EU data centres with 99.9% availability,
– we do continuous server monitoring using a Prometheus-based stack including Grafana dashboards,
– we use Ansible as a Configuration Management Tool,
– we setup alerts about critical events and have an escalation policy in place for each alert,
– we keep secondary server at the ready for manual failover in case of an incident on the primary,
– we keep our keys air-gapped from the internet so that even in the event that someone gains access to our machine our keys are out of reach,
– we have industrial firewalls in place using best practices and continually review our security policies,
– we share knowledge with other Solana operators.
In addition to all above, our server equipment is located in a secure facility, which is being monitored by staff and cctv 24/7, as well as secured with 2FA for entry.