Introduction:
Kingnodes is an Australian-owned blockchain infrastructure provider delivering secure, high-performance validator and RPC services since 2020. On the dYdX, they operate a top-performing validator and power the ecosystem with enterprise-grade RPC endpoints, archive nodes, and snapshot infrastructure.
In this Q&A, we spoke with the Kingnodes team about their dual role as a validator and RPC provider, the systems they’ve built for high availability, the challenges they’ve tackled, and their approach to governance and community engagement on dYdX.
Q: For those who might not be familiar with Kingnodes, can you give us a quick overview of your team and what you do on the dYdX Chain?
Kingnodes is an Australian-owned blockchain infrastructure provider operating since late 2020, with a focus on high-availability validator and RPC services. On the dYdX Chain, we run a mainnet validator and provide enterprise-grade public RPC infrastructure, archive nodes, archive snapshots and related infrastructure. We have been a proud service provider to the dYdX Chain and community since genesis.
Q: Kingnodes has a dual role as both a validator and an RPC provider on dYdX. How do you contribute to the ecosystem in each of these capacities?
As a validator we help maintain consensus by producing blocks, validating transactions, and safeguarding the chain’s integrity. Using remote signers, redundant sentry nodes, and geographically distributed infrastructure to minimise downtime and protect against attacks. Custom in-house monitoring and escalation ensure rapid response to any incidents.
As an RPC infrastructure provider, our enterprise-grade RPC endpoints give developers, traders, and indexers reliable low-latency access to the dYdX Chain. We host full archive history for analytics, backtesting, and research, plus regular snapshots to help new nodes sync quickly. Strategically placed servers in high-performance datacentres to ensure fast response times worldwide. Our RPC infrastructure is available to any developers, indexers, or front ends that want to access the dYdX Chain.
Q: Keeping infrastructure reliable is critical. How do you ensure your validator nodes and RPC endpoints stay online, secure, and up-to-date? Are there specific monitoring tools or best practices you rely on?
For our validator operation we use multiple sentry nodes in east Asia on multiple providers with remote horcrux signer, we have backup nodes located close by that can be utilised in case of a regional issue. For security reasons we do not keep validator keys on sentries. We utilise a higher security model and cloud services like AWS for remote signers to ensure the absolute best performance and uptime. Our validator operations are consistently top 5 in uptime and block signing for the network.
For our RPC operations we use layered high availability systems starting with geographically distributed ingress load balancers and regional load balancers. Health checks are used to remove unhealthy nodes.
We have built completely custom Zabbix based monitoring and alerting systems and use PagerDuty for paging the operations team on any issues that arise.
We use a nebula overlay network for private communications between nodes, signers and load balancers for RPC operations.
Our Ansible automation library helps us deploy software and configuration updates across the entire stack as required. Cascading upgrades help us achieve this with zero downtime and reduced risk of human error.
Q: What’s a challenge you’ve encountered while operating on the dYdX Chain (either on the validator side or the RPC side), and how did you overcome it? Any notable lessons learned from that experience?
For RPC service, we consider core metrics that are key to the user experience being the lowest possible latency to users (how long it takes to get a response from the backend RPC server).
The challenge is to identify where in the world the users are and scope what resources we need in what regions with appropriate specifications to handle the expected peak loads.
This process allows us to use proximity routing to direct incoming requests from the Cloudflare edge network directly to regional proxies, and then backend servers that are within close proximity to the majority of users.
This greatly enhances the user experience on the dYdX platform, and is critical in a decentralised exchange environment.
Q: How does Kingnodes approach dYdX governance and community engagement? Do you have a particular process or philosophy when it comes to voting on proposals or interacting with the community as a validator?
We keep an eye on the dYdX forums and listen for feedback on proposals from the community there. If we have anything constructive to add, we will generally make our opinions known there.
Our primary voting strategy is to do what is best for the chain community of users and the long-term health and sustainability of the blockchain itself, which sometimes does not always align with our own best interests.
Q: For folks looking to become a dYdX validator or run RPC services, what advice would you give? Any tips or best practices from your journey so far that you’d share with new operators?
My advice for new folks wanting to get into node operations and validation is to hit the testnets hard and learn as much as you can. There are so many aspects to node ops and the really good operators never stop seeking knowledge and testing their existing knowledge and methods.
Whenever you have the opportunity, talk to other operators and form relationships.
Never be afraid to help others. This can solidify your knowledge and strengthen your relationships with other operators who may, in turn, help you one day.
Q: Where can people follow Kingnodes’ work or reach out to you to learn more about what you’re doing in the dYdX ecosystem?
The best way to keep up to date with kingnodes is via our X account (https://x.com/kingnodes), telegram (https://t.me/kingnodes) and website https://kingnodes.com
Conclusion
Thank you to the Kingnodes team for sharing your insights! To learn more about their work and stay updated, follow them on X, join their Telegram, and visit kingnodes.com.
Stay tuned for our next validator spotlight in the series!
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