It's an exciting time in the world of Splinterlands! The SPS Validator network has just launched, marking a huge step forward on the path to decentralizing the game. You can think of this network as a type of Hive-based sidechain for Splinterlands transactions, in much the same way that Hive Engine runs a sidechain to add smart contract capabilities to Hive. The nodes on this network are called validators, and initially they are being used to validate SPS related transactions. Eventually, you can imagine the validators being expanded to cover all sorts of other game transactions as well, until we someday reach the Holy Grail of complete decentralization for Splinterlands game services.
I am contributing to the SPS Validator network by running my own validator. As with Hive & Hive Engine witnesses, community members can vote on their favorite validators. Instead of Hive Power or WORKERBEE (in the case of Hive Engine), the weight of your vote is determined by how much SPS you have staked.
I would very much appreciate any votes you guys care to toss my way! My node is named cryptomancer-sps and voting can be done here with your Hive account: https://thespsdao.github.io/SPS-Validator/account-votes/manage
Reminder: only vote if you have some SPS staked in Splinterlands, otherwise your vote will carry no weight.
Well, I imagine most Splinterlands community members already know who I am, but for those of you who may not: I am one of the core feature developers for Splinterlands, and have been a team member for just over 5 years. I joined the team in January 2020, and have been responsible for building out some of the game's major features, including:
These days, I'm the head developer of the Land project, working to keep advancing us step-by-step toward the full vision of the Land 2.0 whitepaper.
What some of you may not know is that I also do some part-time work for Hive Engine. I created the Hive Engine NFT protocol and several other smart contracts for the platform. I also built the EVM & Solana gateways, and am currently responsible for maintaining a large amount of Hive Engine's server infrastructure, including the deposit & withdraw gateways, the Engine team's own HE sidechain node, and an HE account history node.
I've had a lot of experience in coordinating with witnesses when things go wrong on Hive Engine, and have helped keep the sidechain network running smoothly. I know how to administrate a Linux server, follow security best practices, and manage web domains. I'll leverage this experience to provide a reliable SPS Validator node with as close to 100% uptime as possible.
A few things will help my node to stand out amongst others:
Decentralization: many Hive community members prefer to use Privex or Hetzner for server hosting. This creates a centralization risk by having many similar sorts of services all running out of the same data centers. I chose to use a lesser known hosting provider that still offers top quality, with my server running out of a data center in Paris. This will increase the geographic decentralization of the network.
Hardware: my server is an Ubuntu box running 4 dedicated CPUs, 16 GB of RAM, and a 350 GB hard disk optimized for low latency operations, with 800 Mbps of bandwidth. This is more than powerful enough to efficiently run a node, process API requests, and handle expected network growth for the foreseeable future.
API services: as well as running a full node (i.e. storing the entire state of the sidechain for historical lookup purposes), I am committed to providing a publicly available API. This is important: we don't want a Splinterlands company provided API to be a single source of truth for the game. The more alternative APIs are provided by community members, the better the decentralization, and the smaller the risk of a single point of failure.
My node's API can be accessed via https://validator.cryptomancer-sps.com and you can verify its status through the /status endpoint like thus:
https://validator.cryptomancer-sps.com/status
Each Hive account that has SPS staked can vote on up to 10 validators. I'm going to have to think carefully about how I want to distribute my votes, and I may not vote on anybody right away. I'm not going to engage in vote-for-vote back scratching, since my number of votes is limited and I have a large SPS stake.
Rather, I intend to use my votes to support nodes that are likely to increase the strength of the network. To be considered for my vote you must, at a minimum, be running a full node and provide a public API via an SSL secured domain name the same way I do.
Your standing in the community and how well known you are, as well as the level of your investment in Splinterlands assets and how long you have been playing the game, will also be a consideration.
Now get out there and vote for your favorite validators, and let's usher in a bright new era for Splinterlands together! May your wins in the arena be plentiful, and may your card collection never fail you.
Vote for cryptomancer-sps here:
https://thespsdao.github.io/SPS-Validator/account-votes/manage
