Welcome to the Staking Operators Introduction Thread!

🤷‍♀️ All-Purpose Hangout
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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