Q&A with Polkachu: Validator and Infrastructure Provider for dYdX

Introduction

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Polkachu is a key validator and infrastructure provider supporting the dYdX Chain. Known for their robust and reliable operations, Polkachu offers community services like public RPC nodes, up-to-date snapshots for quick node syncing, and archival infrastructure to help maintain the network. As a veteran of many proof-of-stake blockchains, Polkachu brings a wealth of experience to the dYdX community. In this Q&A, we got to chat with the Polkachu team about their background, the services they provide, and their plans in the dYdX ecosystem.

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Q: For people who might not be familiar, can you explain how Polkachu supports the dYdX ecosystem beyond being a validator?

We support dYdX in 3 ways. First, we run one of the top 10 validators on the network. Second, we run robust RPC and archive node infrastructure for dYdX (funded by a dYdX grant). Third, we run free public node operator infrastructure (snapshot, state-sync, RPC, API, seed, peer). 

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Q: You are a provider of full and archival nodes - why are those important for the dYdX Chain and community?

For any blockchain project, it is important to maintain the full blockchain history by multiple independent parties. This allows anyone to verify the state transition at any point in history, thus verifying the validity of the chain.   

Q: What kind of teams or users benefit the most from using your infrastructure (like snapshots, endpoints, etc.)?

The target users of our infrastructure are developers. We try our best to not gate any of our services (no sign-up, no paywall, etc) so developers can just get a link and start working on what they want to create. 

Q: How do you make sure your public infrastructure (RPC, snapshots, etc.) stays reliable and up-to-date, especially during upgrades or periods of high usage?

The secret sauce is to treat it as our job. Zooming out, the product we offer is not just a RPC or a snapshot. Rather, what we try to “sell” is the wide coverage and reliability of such services. In a way, this is the key idea that many of Polkachu’s copycats miss. Once we have the mental model right (that is, reliability is all that matters), then we automate everything we can automate and then use our manual diligence to make up for anything that we cannot automate.  

Q: What’s a behind-the-scenes challenge you’ve had to solve while maintaining these services for dYdX?

There are no challenges, only opportunities :-) 

Seriously though, the biggest challenge is learning on the job. While we have deep experiences in dev-ops, there are always instances that we get a request that we do not know how to handle. For example, one team asked us to secure a gRPC endpoint with SSL. We have never done it before. So we leveraged all the modern learning resources (Google, ChatGPT, YouTube) and quickly figured it out within a few hours and finished the task. 

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Q: What’s something you wish more dYdX users or validators knew about running infrastructure at this scale?

It is very important to have the mindset of a software engineer when approaching DevOps. As an infrastructure provider, it is easy to pick up the first tasks. However, once you start managing hundreds of networks, things tend to fall apart. At that tipping point, many infrastructure providers often decide to churn the least profitable networks while focusing on the main ones, or grow their team size to divide and conquer. We take a very different approach. We always add new networks and do not churn and rarely add headcount. When it reaches the tipping point, we write our own custom software to automate tasks. Over time, we have developed many pieces of custom software to manage the “chaos” behind the scenes.

Conclusion

Thank you to the Polkachu team for sharing their insights! Be sure to follow them on Twitter (@polkachu_intern), visit their website (polkachu.com), and check out their blog posts like Holy Trinity: A System Approach to Tendermint-Based Chain Validation and the Polkachu Playbook.
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