Øx Block Producer Candidate Introduction

in #eosio6 years ago

The outcry of the coming boom, when the worlds of video gaming and DLT unite, is echoing louder day by day. We have been preparing to ride this wave, at least, since the inception of ØxGames, but up until recently, there has been no technological infrastructure sufficiently formidable to disrupt video gaming. This was the case until early June 2018, when the EOS mainnet finally launched. And today we are ready to announce our candidacy to be elected as a Block Producer for the EOSIO mainnet.

Our Mission and Vision

We at ØxGames strongly believe that two preconditions must be met in order for DLT to prosper and thrive. The first is a platform sufficiently scalable and flexible to accommodate the emerging, yet unknown, demands of the new era. EOSIO is that platform. The second is a strong enough channel for mass adoption. In our view, Gaming is among the most potent propagation channels. The intersection between the two is where the fire of mass adoption ignites. And this is where we stand.
Our case for joining the EOS world – we look forward to building our games on EOS therefore becoming a part of its growing ecosystem. We view it as a natural extension of the ideology, fueling the community powerhouse of EOS. Naturally, our active and potential customers grow as we introduce new features and DApps to the network.
The economic surplus generated by the activity within the network has to be channeled inwards. The generated resources are going to help DApp developers in their efforts to bring ideas into reality. ØxGames has successfully deployed decentralized applications on different blockchains. ØxUniverse is still one of the most popular DApp on the Ethereum Network, while ØxWarriors can be played either on TRON or EOS blockchains.

Team behind ØxGames

Our intention to carry the expanding blockchain industry a step further into the future lasts already for almost an entire decade. This makes up a combined century of liberty, ideals-powered inspiration, that we have consistently channeled into the FinTech world. We are a technically inclined team of early adopters of cryptocurrencies and related technologies. The aforementioned needs no further proof but our track record of creating and deploying successful DApps.

Location

ØxGames is based in France. Being the center of European technological progress and international cooperation Netherlands is the Kingdom where innovative ideas are born.

Our Values

We are committed to using all fee rewards and other benefits accruing to us from producing EOS blocks exclusively for supporting the underlying BP infrastructure as well as developing and marketing of more DApps, thereby enriching further the surrounding ecosystem. Transparent and, hence, verifiably fair or ‘trustless’, this process will be completely aligned with the values that have been, are, and forever will power our work, our team and our ideals. These values are:

1. Fairness to community, transparency to each and every stakeholder,
2. Dedication to burning as much midnight oil as it takes to improve upon the results of yesterday,
3. Open-source code, and beyond anything,
4. Inspiration looming through every finest detail of the products we create.

Infrastructure

Security

We will use multisignature schemes for all the BP operations involving holding of actual coins (e.g. in the form of BP rewards). The signing schedule will rotate every day, there will be a delay of 12 hours for every approved claim reward operation, while the treasury function will be segregated from the claim reward function. The out-of-band signing functionality will be employed to reduce the risks associated with exposing the signing key. The owner key will at all times be cold-stored and will only be used in force majeure situations.

A VPN backup will be deployed to ensure resilience of the BP infrastructure to large DDOS attacks. To ensure that DDoS attacks have minimal, if any, effect on the stability of BP performance, AWS Shield is utilized, which does not limit network access of affected servers leading to much quicker service recovery.

Following the industry security standards and recommendations, Host security is ensured employing, among others, the following methods:

  • Custom security rules are designed for AWS
  • P2P/RPC ports are random and irrelevant service ports are closed
  • The SSH port is also customized and configured to allow strictly private key authentication and access is restricted to a limited number of IPs of the core team

There actual architecture of servers that we run is designed to ensure: (a) resilience and (b) scalability.

Hardware

  • CPU: Xeon E3-1240 V6 / 1 CPU @ 3.7 GHz with 8MB cache Level 3
  • Storage: Two 500GB SSD
  • RAM: 64GB DDR4 ecc

The aforementioned hardware is “hot swap”– deployed on the two machines to ensure the consistent performance of the BP.

Architecture

The servers are located in the EU. The SEED, the API (combined referred to as EOS API) and the BP (EOS BP) are the three instances of the first node. The BP listens to the network via the EOS API. On the second node, the EOS API instances are deployed on a single machine while the BP is likewise separate and has no direct exposure to the broader net.

Both EOS APIs are protected by a firewall and are deployed using different ISPs (Internet Service Providers). Most of our processes and procedures are designed to avoid the concentration of any form of technological risk: physically, the actual servers are deployed in different data centers.

AWS Route 53 Service Discovery (SD) module is set up to provide high-frequency feeds of the current status of node instances directly to the Load Balancer (LB). If an instance fails, the consistent performance of the BP entity will continue, as the switchover to the reserve machine is ensured to be instantaneous by employing Amazon automated DNS record management.

Scaling and Hardware Upgrade Roadmap

A cluster of inactive full nodes is set up to ensure high availability and quick access to the EOS blockchain. An IPFS-node infrastructure will be developed in order to accommodate the forward-looking, in terms of scalability, EOS Storage plan. Regardless of the block production rewards a fixed amount of funds will be dedicated to the hard drive and RAM expansions during the first year of operations. Moreover, following new features and solutions within the EOS network, we are closely looking at liquidApps that are going to be an integral part of the EOS ecosystem soon.
Finally, as it is company policy, we will search for novel ways to improve, develop, and deploy solutions that are aimed to further our overall initiative of constant scalability.

Benefits for the EOS Community

We determine our place in the EOS ecosystem as the independent block producer. Øx mission remains true to the principles set by Satoshi Nakamoto, aiming progressive development of the whole system and the prosperity of the entire community. The merger of the cornerstones of the gaming and blockchain industries – transparency, platform scalability and strong experience in mass adoption, gives ØxGames unprecedented opportunities for growth. Take a step into a new era of EOS with us.

Contacts

Meet us at:

Twitter
Steemit
Reddit
Medium

Get in touch with us:
E-mail: [email protected]

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