Announcing our WAX Guild Candidacy

Intro

Greymass is an organization built to facilitate the growth of distributed ledger technologies and the infrastructure that powers them. Our work includes acting as network validators, active participation in network governance, and building of infrastructure tools and services to power the network and the applications built on top of it. Our team has experience working on a number of different blockchains and distributed systems, and we have particular expertise in EOSIO software. We’re excited to bring our suite of products and services to the WAX ecosystem.

Company Info:

Website: Greymass.com
Headquarters: Vancouver, Canada
Candidate Name: Team Greymass ( teamgreymass )
Location of Servers: Vancouver (CA), Michigan (USA)
Server Types: Greymass-owned Bare Metal

Socials

• Twitter
• Telegram
• Github
• Reddit
• Steem

Team

Aaron Cox, Full Stack & Blockchain Developer

Aaron is a veteran web developer with over 20 years experience, specializing in publishing platforms, social/community engines, and data mining. Aaron has released all his efforts open-source, merged his past experiences with new Blockchain protocols, and has previously worked on developing a crowd-sourced review platform and as the lead web developer for a number of tech companies, such as NCSOFT.

Aaron is incredibly fascinated by the impact Blockchain technologies will have on the Internet itself. Since devoting himself full-time to exploring this tech he has built a number of apps including wallets like Vessel, a number of block explorers, and prototypes for end users platforms such as chainBB and Reprint. Aaron is currently a top elected delegate as @jesta on the Steem, Decent, Muse, and Karma blockchains.

Scott Sallinen, Research Scientist

Scott is a Computer Engineering Ph.D. Candidate at the University of British Columbia, with research areas of High Performance Computing and Distributed Systems, Graph Processing, Machine Learning, and Blockchain technologies. Scott has published multiple peer-reviewed papers within these domains in top-tier research conferences such as Supercomputing, and has previously worked in the research divisions of Fortune 500 companies such as Intel and Facebook.

Scott has a passion for the application of Blockchain technologies in the real world. He has built and led the Steemcleaners and Cheetah projects on the Steem blockchain for several years, in an effort to address and reduce fraud and phishing on the social media platform. Scott also represents a top elected delegate as @anyx on the Steem blockchain.

Daniel Fugere, Web App Developer

Daniel is an entrepreneur and software engineer who develops applications that aim to improve the lives of others. At age 19, he started his first web company, through which he developed a health service application for residents of Quebec. He has since continued creating different web applications that have the ultimate goal of making individuals more aware of the issues around them, as well as build positive relationships with people in their communities.

Over the last couple of years, he has worked as a web engineer and has done back-end as well as front-end programming for projects at big companies such as Pixar, Autodesk and Riot Games. A blockchain enthusiast and avid learner of everything crypto, Daniel has been involved with Greymass since its first steps, helping develop and engineer the nitty-gritty workings of the eos-voter app (recently rebranded to Anchor).

Johan Nordberg, Software Engineer

Johan is a prolific developer with a broad range of experience and a passion for open-source — he has released a multitude of open-source projects, many of which are widely used. He founded his first company at age 23 after releasing one of the first iPhone apps in the AppStore. Besides iOS development, his specialties are security research, systems design and web development.

Johan is a strong advocate for the Open Web and believes that blockchain technology has the potential to fundamentally change the world for the better. At Greymass he will be focusing on building our upcoming dApps-platform.

Myles Snider, Business Development Partner

Myles Snider is the newest addition to the team, recently joining Greymass as a partner. Myles has been involved in the EOS ecosystem since long before mainnet launch. He previously lead research at Multicoin Capital, where he published a number of EOS-focused investment reports. He also created The Stablecoin Index, a tool to track and compare various stablecoin projects.Later, he founded a mainnet block producer called Aurora EOS before eventually joining Greymass.

Myles has written extensively about EOS economics and governance, and he’ll continue to do so in his new role here. He’ll also focus on interfacing with the community and helping bring more awareness to Greymass’s core product offerings. Myles also hosts an EOS-focused podcast called EOS Voter and writes a bi-weekly newsletter about the EOSIO ecosystem.

Nicholas Hamer, Visual Designer

Nicholas Hamer is a Sr Designer at Blizzard. With a diverse background in Graphic Design and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration from the Ringling College of Art and Design, he has a strong sense of composition with the ability to be versatile and think creatively. Having worked on music videos, web sites, video games advertising campaigns, feature films, and television shows, he has gained extensive experience successfully working with applied design, UX, compositing, and motion graphics through the use of programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, InDesign, Maya, Nuke, and Cinema 4d; A combination of skills that assist him in his ‘out of the box’ thinking and helps to provide a fresh creative perspective to any of his project.

Infrastructure

Our infrastructure is ever expanding and evolving, and we operate many dedicated servers to provide a variety of services. We customize all of our hardware specifically for each application to ensure the absolute best performance.

To facilitate this, we have a multi-year lease with a Tier 3 data center which provides us with power redundancy, multiple independent internet connections, within a facility that is physically secured to prevent unauthorized access.

Our fleet of dedicated servers is comprised of components which provide the maximum throughput for each specific task. Currently we leverage high single-core clock speed processors, high volumes of RAM, and the fastest hard drives on the market. As an example, our most recent acquisition, which is being built to serve as a full history node for the EOS Mainnet, has the following specifications:

CPU:

• Intel Xeon Gold 6244 (Cascade Lake Gen2, 8 cores @ 4.4 GHz)

RAM:

• 768 GB DDR4 ECC

Storage:

• 3D Xpoint (Optane) PCIE: 1.5 TB x4
• 3D Xpoint (Optane) M.2: 380 GB x3
• SATA SSD: 4 TB x4

This server will be coming online very soon to add further redundancy to the full history nodes we already operate for the EOS blockchain.

Scaling Infrastructure

The approach we take on scaling EOSIO based blockchains is iterative - in that we continually are researching, testing, and deploying some of the newest hardware to keep pace with the growth of each blockchain we operate. As each chain grows, our infrastructure grows with it, with older generations of hardware being recycled back into the system with new purpose.

Beyond scaling hardware to meet demands, we also build custom software solutions on top of that hardware to help extend its lifespan. Utilizing various methods of data compression, caching, and actual software optimization - we are able to provide some of the fastest and most scalable solutions found anywhere within the EOSIO ecosystem. We are proud to operate some of the fastest block production nodes on any network, as well as some of the most trafficked and fastest public API services.

Finally, the last piece of our infrastructure is the usage of select cloud platforms to provide a more globally distributed network. All mission critical resources are operated on our own servers within our specifically designed network, but we operate less critical services through multiple dedicated servers within the cloud. These servers ultimately rely on our data center for portions of their data, but are able to serve the majority of responses responses much faster when they are physically located closer to the end user.

A significant portion of the Greymass budget is allocated to hardware and networking expenses. Within our last year of operations, we have invested around $100k (USD) into building and scaling our infrastructure.

Thoughts on Governance

We believe that validators on EOSIO networks have two core responsibilities— providing reliable and secure chain infrastructure, and participating in network governance. Validators (whether BPs, guilds, or other forms) serve as the elected representatives of the community, and they are tasked with guiding the evolution of the network and creating value in line with the desires of the token holders, who are the collective owners of the network. We believe that block producers should be proactive in offering leadership and opinions on important governance issues, and we also believe that they should utilize tools like referendum wherever available to more accurately gauge community sentiment.

Thoughts on Transparency and Accountability

As our code of conduct makes clear, we hold ourselves to an extremely high standard when it comes to transparency, accountability, and community trust. We believe in high levels of transparency not just in our actions within the community, but also with our products and services. All of our code is open-source, and security audits are welcome.

Thoughts on Security

The sovereignty, privacy, and security of blockchain is one of our top priorities; both in terms of the operations of the network (as a block producer) and for the end-user (in developing a wallet and APIs).

The blockchain itself must be operated by professionals who understand these concepts and the impact of their own actions. The actual block production itself must be performed in an unbiased and secure manner, with proper redundancy and management of it’s security. For each network we participate in, we operate this service on physically secured servers with restricted access and the highest levels of key management.

On the end-user side, we also put serious consideration into how best to secure their assets and maintain privacy. We have developed and released a secure open-source wallet for anyone to use with any EOSIO-based blockchain and continually seek ways to improve it. This wallet has specifically been designed to operate with only a single connection to the specified blockchain, using only native APIs and no external calls to help ensure privacy with its use. To that end we also operate a number of public “no-log” API servers, which anyone can use to access the network without the fear of any sort of invasion of privacy.

Community Benefit Projects

Anchor Wallet

Anchor Wallet (previously called eos-voter) is an EOSIO desktop wallet that allows users to safely and easily take advantage of the full suite of features of the EOSIO software. We have integrated WAX as a native option so that WAX users are able to safely and easily do things like send and receive tokens, manage resources, participate in governance, and much more.

Native History APIs / Light History

At Greymass, APIs are one of our specialties. Not only are we one of the few block producers running native history APIs on the EOS mainnet, but we also developed the light history solution used by a number of other BPs today. If elected, we plan to bring both of these infrastructure solutions to the WAX blockchain.

DApp Middleware and Infrastructure

We’re currently working on a dApp middleware and infrastructure layer that will include a number of important projects. The first is our EEP7 signing protocol , a new protocol that allows for easy communication between applications and signature providers, with the ability to request specific transaction templates. In the future, we’ll continue to work on projects that make using the blockchain more easy and secure for both developers and end users. Each of these projects will be generalizable to EOSIO and can be easily made to support WAX.

More of our projects can be seen on our Github page .

Thank you for your support! We look forward to being a part of the WAX ecosystem!