TOKENIKA - Official candidacy for the EOS Block Producer node, full specification.

1. PUBLIC PRESENCE

https://tokenika.io

Social Media accounts:

• https://steemit.com/@tokenika
• https://github.com/tokenika
• https://twitter.com/tokenika_io

2. ID ON STEEMIT

• Official block producer candidate name: Tokenika
• Location of company headquarters: Warsaw, Poland
• Expected location of servers: three datacenters located in Warsaw, Cracow and Katowice.
• Type of servers: mainly bare metal but also cloud for quick scaling
• Current employee list and pictures of at least 67% of staff: https://tokenika.io/team
• Relevant background qualifications for at least 67% of staff: https://tokenika.io/team

3. TECH SPECS

• We are using tier 3+ datacenters across Poland in 3 different cities with plenty of room for growth (20-40 rack units in each). Available now, more if needed.
• Tier datacenter standards are described here.
• We'll have 3 main servers: Nike, Wawel & Hanys (Dual Xeon E5-2687W with 512GB RAM ECC DDR4). Plus a bunch of other boxes powering our base infrastructure.
• That gives 24 cores (48 threads) per machine for a total of 72 cores or 144 threads, which powered by up to 3.5GHz gives excellent single-core performance.
• At least two of them will be available from day one to deal with our basic needs.
• They served us well for months, we are switching from SSDs to NVMes, as their base storage and adding some RAM.
• Total resource expenditures by June 3rd should come in around $20k

4. SCALING PLAN

• Actually it's not the hardware specs that make us feel ready for EOS launch. It's the ability to scale rapidly. We are expecting the unexpected.
• We are partnered with external infrastructure providers ready to boost our processing power within minutes. Thus, in the event of very heavy loads, we are able to expand our datacenter capacity by orders of magnitude in near real-time.
• Additionally, we plan to use cloud solutions, including SDDC (software-defined datacenter).
• Initially, when nobody knows what the actual demand for processing power is going to be, we'll be to some degree dependent on our partners (i.e. external providers). However when the dust settles (most probably by September), we'll be operating our own machines and relying less on external partners, while still keeping a close relationship with them to be able to scale quickly.

5. COMMUNITY BENEFIT

As a software house and an EOS decicated incubator, we are currently involved in development of several projects for the EOS blockchain. These are:

• EOSPROJECTS, a comprehensive listing of all tools and initiatives making up the EOS ecosystem.
• EOSPROBE - not only a block explorer but also a tool for monitoring witnesses' performance, similar to Steem's SteemDB.
• EOSFACTORY, a framework for compiling, testing and deploying EOS smart-contracts, similar to Ethereum's Truffle Framework.
• SYGNET - an EOS-based digital identity system.

We have a proven track record in supporting the EOS community since its beginnings that can be verified here, on our Steem profile and our Github profile. We have spoken at conferences and meetups promoting EOS, been a heavy supporter of Dan Larimer's (@dantheman) projects since early days of Bitshares (around 2013) and have regularly contributed to promotion of EOS since its inception. Our team members manage one of the best performing Steem witness nodes, consistently scoring in the top 3 for the least amount of dropped blocks. This separates us from other witness candidates with no track record or expertise, with a history of a only a few SM posts, dating several weeks back at best.

We are also aware of the utilitarian role of a witness node, and in the event of a high surplus of income from the witness voting, we are planning to set up a transparent, blockchain auditable software incubator that redistributes a certain percentage of the witness income towards finding and promotion of most interesting startups. The precise formula of this will be worked out when the economics of an EOS witness node become more clear.

6. TELEGRAM+TESTNET

Our Telegram handle is @tokenika.
On the community testnet we're active under the name of rogue.

7. TOKENIKA BLOCK PRODUCER VALUES

We have been a firm supporter of Dan Larimer’s vision of DPOS (delegated proof of stake) from it’s early beginnings, even before the launch of Bitshares. This long term shared vision is based on the belief that the greater good of any community is the only way to the prosperity of its individual actors. We are therefore as far away as possible from any opportunistic strategies in securing votes, or winning over powerful stakeholders. We have been happily volunteering for the “heavy lifting” roles since the beginnings of DPOS. This position stems from our belief that a well implemented DPOS consensus is the closest mechanism to real life, when dealing with digital governance of large populations. Thus, our involvement and campaigning in EOS Block Production is a very organic one - we see the success of DPOS as inevitable and are natural contributors.

Community projects

Our recent release of EOSFactory is a good example of contribution to the EOS community - by popular demand we provided an important solution for testing and writing smart contracts, and open-sourced it. This is our modus operandi in general - we create things and share the results, within reasonable business constraints.

We currently have two more big dApp projects (Sygnet, mentioned earlier, and another to be disclosed soon) in the pipeline, plus a very likely airdrop for one of them. That, however, have nothing to do with the BP mission, and are separate dApps with benefit for the whole community. As to precise timeline, we are aiming for a release of one of the mentioned projects in late 2018 or early 2019, depending on the smoothness of the development process.

Financing and transparency

We have advocated the need for transparency of block producers operations quite early on. We see a BP’s role as a neutral supporter of the ecosystem. BP’s should never get involved in politics, taking sides, or running undisclosed business operations on the back of their BP income.
Our BP financing plan assumes, that in case of a vivid surplus of income from the BP node, we are going to redistribute a part of this back into the system, in form of development of dApps, developer education and boots-on-the-ground promotion of EOS.
The financing of the datacenters, as well as the money, flows stemming from the BP node are all going to be made public by Tokenika. Also note, that we are a business, and profit is one of our aims, so do not expect a Robin Hood type of approach - in order to serve the EOS community well, we need to remain self-sustainable.

8. TOKENIKA POSITION ON DIVIDENDS, VOTE BUYING AND GOVERNANCE

As to the written policy on vote buying and governance, it can be summarised in two paragraphs:

We are against vote buying in any form or shape, and are not, and will not be offering any profit sharing with our voters. Our contribution to the system has always been in form of adding value, and not crude redistribution of income.

We will abide by the EOS constitution at all times - Tokenika’s BP is a mere servant, and at best, an advisor for the EOS community, even if the public ruling stands in conflict with our personal views.

Having said that, we are not advocates for heavy regulation of business practices around EOS. In our view, young distributed systems must find a natural market equilibrium. Stark regulation, arbitration and other penalising measures open up a can of worms, in which authority has to be imposed externally, and might result in forking of chains, endless disputes, or even render the system unstable. We are libertarians at heart and believe that market forces always find a way to balance things out.