Welcome to the Staking Delegator Introduction Thread!

Hello Starknet community!

If you’re a delegator or someone interested in staking on Starknet, you’re in the right place!

This thread is dedicated to introducing yourself and connecting with other delegators and node operators in our ecosystem. As we all begin the journey toward decentralization, we’d love for everyone to get to know each other better. Feel free to share:

  • Who you are
  • Your goals and contributions to the Starknet Ecosystem

We encourage all node operators to join the conversation and we look forward to hearing your stories!

Hello Starknet Community!

We are Nethermind, a 300+ member strong decentralized team of Web 3 builders and infrastructure operators who have been regular contributors to the Starknet ecosystem! We’re deeply committed to building a stronger, more decentralized Starknet.

As a future Starknet Validator, our goal is to provide the best experience for our stakers every step of the way.

Why Stake with Nethermind?

Expertise You Can Trust: We’re dedicated Starknet builders! Our deep understanding of the protocol ensures your stake is in capable hands.

Our Ecosystem Contributions: Providing services like Voyager, Juno, Starknet RPC, and more, our work is widely recognized across the Starknet ecosystem.

Seasoned Validators: We maintain 7000 Ethereum validators for Lido and around 100 of our own. At Twinstake we maintain a few thousand more. Along with the Twinstake team, we validate Cosmos, Solana, NEAR, etc.

Nethermind is looking forward to be part of this journey with the Starknet Ecosystem and are here to help with any questions you may have.

Let’s work together to shape the future of Starknet!

Looking forward to meeting everyone in this thread. Feel free to reach out to us anytime!

Stake with us at:

Institutional delegators should reach out to our partners at Twinstake: https://www.twinstake.io/

Learn more: Nethermind.io

Hello everyone!

I am Apoorv here, founder of Karnot. Our team has been working in the Starknet ecosystem for almost 2 years and I am proud to say that we will be a node operator on Starknet from Day 0.

About Karnot

While the members of the Karnot team have actively contributed to multiple Starknet projects in the past, today Karnot is mainly focussed on two arms:

  1. Maintainers of Madara: Madara is a mainnet ready full node and an open source app chain stack to build app chains using the Starknet tech. Karnot is a member of the Madara alliance (along with amazing teams like Kasar Labs, Pragma and Moonsong Labs) - the team that is actively involved in the development and maintainance of the stack. Madara will potentially also be the one of the clients to be used as a validator when Starknet decentralises. Everything is open source and you can find all our here and here.
  2. RaaS: We’re the first and the leading Rollup as a Service provider for app chains in the Starknet ecosystem. We currently work with top Starknet teams like Kakarot zkEVM and Pragma. Our aim is to make Cairo, and the amazing tech that has been built here at Starknet over the years, easily extendable and usable.

Why did Karnot choose to become a validator?

We noticed a lot of teams announcing that they will be running validators for Starknet. That’s awesome and it’s great to have multiple organisations and groups participating as validators. However, with so many validators, you start asking yourself how do you even decide upon a validator to stake with. I feel there are 3 import checkboxes that a validator should tick

  1. The team has the technical expertise to manage validators
  2. The team is actively involved in the ecosystem and can be trusted to take part in decision making and upgrades
  3. The team doesn’t charge a very high commission

Firstly, many teams haven’t disclosed 3 just yet so it’s difficult to evaluate. However, after checking previous data and some conversations, we found that most teams didn’t really check all 3 boxes (at least for us, you should of course DYOR). Given this and the fact that Karnot is a deep infra company with a lot of systems already in place to run sequencers/validators, it felt like a no brainer for us to step up and participate as node operators!

Why should you stake with Karnot

So why should you stake with Karnot? It’s simple, we check all the three boxes mentioned above :slight_smile:

  1. Technical expertise: Our main offering as a company is infra. We run production grade sequencers for app chains and are actively involved in Starknet protocol development as well. Even before Karnot, our core team has been involved in scaling some of the top web2 companies. We do this 24/7 and take enterprise infrastructure seriously.

  2. Ecosystem involvement: As mentioned, our team has been actively involved in the Starknet ecosystem for close to 2 years now. We have been in the Starknet ecosystem from the very early days and we’re committed to staying here playing our role in making Starknet greater. In fact, the success of our company is closely tied to the success of Starknet and the technology we’re building. In fact, every member of our team is spending all their time building in the ecosystem. To be specific to staking, we are already involved in community discussions and will be launching a staking dashboard soon where you can check all node operators, stake money, see your portfolio and more!

  3. Zero commission: If you have been following art peace for the last few days, you probably know this already. However, will say it again, Karnot will not be charging any commission on top of your rewards! This means that when you stake with Karnot, you get the maximum rewards possible. Some people have rightly questioned us the last few days to understand how will we sustain this. Well, there are two costs to managing validators

    a. Cloud costs
    b. Operational costs

    Today, the majority of costs come from (b). And Karnot, being a RaaS, already has most of the infrastructure in place (or in some way is already bearing those costs as our core offering is running app chains for customers). And we don’t feel that (a) is significant enough for us today to charge a commission from delegators. That’s it!

So to put it simply, Karnot doesn’t have any revenue model behind staking. We’re here for someone who’s going through the node operator list, has some STRK to stake and is looking for someone who checks all 3 boxes. If that’s you,

Stake with Karnot

Hello Starknet community,

My name is Esther, i am a smart contract developer, technical writer and a Starknet wolf

Its nice to meet delegators here

Hello Starknet community! :wave:

We are onchainaustria, an Austrian community and association dedicated to fostering the growth of blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies in Austria. Together, we are staking Ethereum by running our own nodes, as well as other coins, helping our members navigate the crypto landscape while contributing to various ecosystems. Our team is passionate about decentralization, and we were thrilled to be part of the Starknet Airdrop, receiving a good number of coins due to our early engagement in Ethereum staking.

As active users of the Starknet ecosystem, we’re now taking a big step forward: we plan to run a Starknet node dedicated to our community! This will allow our members to stake their coins together as an association, directly on Starknet, while contributing to the network’s security and decentralization.

In addition, we are in the process of forming the first legally recognized DAO in Austria, and Starknet might be the Layer 2 of choice for its deployment.

If you’re interested in joining us on this exciting journey, feel free to reach out! We’re always happy to connect with fellow delegators and node operators.

Let’s keep building the future of decentralization, together! :rocket:

Web: onchainaustria.at