Upnode

Upnode is a validator and staking provider covering Cosmos, Celestia, Ethereum, Solana and other networks, with a model that sets the validator commission at zero and rebates fees to delegators monthly, earning instead from its own stake and ecosystem incentives. Nodes run active-standby across regions, the primary on bare metal for block-production latency and the standby isolated in virtual machines, both reached through a VPN behind a hardware firewall, with keys held in a YubiHSM2 signing module.

The operations stack combines Tenderduty, Grafana, Loki and Prometheus: missed blocks, chain anomalies and node outages raise alerts that page the on-call engineer, and coverage runs across two time zones so someone always picks up. The team also productised its own deployment tooling as an API deployment tool for developers, backed by an Optimism grant. On governance it votes against spam proposals as a rule and generally supports official upgrade proposals.