We are pleased to officially announce our candidacy to be elected as a Block Producer for the EOS.IO mainnet. Founded by a team of serial tech entrepreneurs, EOS Canada is headquartered in Montreal, Canada and is backed by major Canadian financial institutions. We believe that EOS.IO will fundamentally change our economic and social systems and as such we are deeply committed to contribute to the growth of the ecosystem.
We have been actively involved in running and testing the community testnet and in the creation of the BIOS Boot sequence, as well in building various community tools necessary for the ecosystem to flourish. Our objective is to develop a hub for companies, entrepreneurs and developers who want to build infrastructure and decentralized applications on top of EOS.IO. Due to our deep tech background and connections, we would like to leverage our network to help build value-add products for the EOS.IO network.
Marc-Antoine is a leader. He has a passion for building teams, and is constantly evaluating those he meets to figure out how they can bring their skills to the multitude of projects that he touches. From there, he figures out what he needs to do to make their talent shine. He is a serial entrepreneur, having started his first company at 21. He has co-founded three successful companies, two of which were acquired by major tech companies. Marc-Antoine is very well known in the Montreal tech community, personally advising several startups and mentoring companies through Founder Institute and FounderFuel. He is also an ambassador for United Way and has raised significant donations from the tech community.
Alexandre lives through technology. He wrote his first botnet at 12, later graduated in classical piano and went on to a prolific career in software engineering, with notable open source contributions. Alexandre co-founded two startups, including Bitcredits (a bitcoin payments processor, FounderFuel 2014 Spring Cohort). He then helped PasswordBox (acquired by Intel) craft their data stack and ended up as a lead Data Scientist in the Intel Security Consumer division. Today, Alexandre is very active in the blockchain space, advising several early stage companies. Alexandre taught programming for many years. He does live-coding presentations like no one else (Confoo, PyCon conferences) and is the lead organizer of Golang Montréal. You’ll often find him on Telegram, working through lines of code and bugs with others, doing what he can to help build the EOS community.
Mathieu knows how to get things done, and get them done right. His background is in investment banking, rising to level of Vice President. His expertise is in both buy- and sell-side M&A transactions, as well as public and private equity issuances across several industries, with a focus on the technology and biotechnology sectors. He has been following the blockchain space for years, drawn in by its ability to transform the financial structures for the better.
Josh wants to educate those around him. Understanding systems, from the simplest to the most complex, is a passion of his. Since trying to wrap his head around cryptocurrency a couple years back, he’s become a missionary -- urging those around him to understand this technology that will underpin tomorrow’s world. He’s a jack of all trades, having worked on designing home building systems, fine woodworking, and running restaurants. His latest passion is the crypto space, and is looking to to be part of those who lead this change, bringing one of the most complex and far reaching systems that has the ability to touch every industry.
We will pay taxes in Canada and will be working with our tax and financial advisors to support the ecosystem members that we hope to foster. Our advisors have experience structuring and advising leading cryptoasset miners, ICOs and other blockchain-related ventures, and will be able to help with any jurisdictional or regulatory issues that may arise.
We plan on adding a geographically distributed data center deployment to our infrastructure for optimized low latency file storage and distribution as needed through the introduction of EOS.IO IPFS integration.
Our high availability infrastructure will be deployed and managed through Kubernetes, which enables us to easily scale up and out on demand with no impact on our uptime.
Note: We will be presenting the thought process and security features of our infrastructure in a series of video posts in the near future.
Our application stack has been reviewed by Elliptica Security, an application security consulting firm with whom we have worked on security solutions previously (as part of Intel Security). We intend to run periodic security reviews of our infrastructure, security practices and key management strategies. We will keep the community informed of any changes or looming threats.
We propose keeping both the block signing and block producing nodes inside of isolated VPCs running on private Kubernetes clusters, as you can see in the above diagram of our infrastructure. This enables us to tightly control network access for secure management and increased protection of sensitive key material. We will load balanced all of the traffic to three nodes in each zone, allowing for full uptime, as well as maintenance capabilities as the need for software or hardware upgrade occurs.
In addition to the infrastructure diagram, we have utilized the PASTA (Process for Attack Simulation and Threat Analysis) threat modeling methodology for analyzing and mitigating threats.
We want to start with GCP’s best-adapted machine, with the lowest cost. Our tooling supports launching a new machine, syncing from a backup (max 24 hours old), and rotating our producing nodes (and both peering and service nodes) in approximately 15 minutes. We believe that supporting a high-quality infrastructure like this is the best use of the EOS BP funds.
Once the IPFS layer of EOS.IO is launched, we plan on adding globally distributed nodes that will service the storage needs of the EOS community. We know that abuse of IPFS services is a real risk, and we plan to have filters to only serve files that are referenced on the EOS.IO blockchain and do not violate any laws, regulations, or the constitution of the EOS.IO network. We will also prepare to manage takedown notices from different regulating bodies, should the need arise.
We will continuously be testing and developing new services and features, and supporting the mainnet infrastructure.
We are also fully aware of the broader community who are not yet involved in the cryptoasset space. We would like to take a strong position in educating the general public through outreach programs, such as meetups, relationships with educational institutions, and content creation that will be accessible to those with no knowledge of the space already. EOS Canada also has ties to large global financial institutions based in Canada. This will give us the ability to understand the friction points experienced by large organizations as they begin to adopt EOS.IO, and help them develop solutions that were not possible before the EOS.IO software.
Diagram is a launchpad building Canadian-based, global tech champions in insurance, financial, and healthcare technology.
