About

Block Pane, LLC.

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Phone: +1 (720) 570-4100
E-Mail: security [at] blockpane [dot] com

Block Pane was founded in 2018 by Todd Garrison, who has worked in the financial, technology, and blockchain industries as an information security engineer. Todd holds the AWS Certified Security - Specialty, and Offensive Security Certified Professional certifications.

Code of Conduct

Values

• Honesty and integrity are the only real currency that we have to offer.
• Exhibit humility, patience, and openness with others.
• Celebrate failure: Own our mistakes, allow others to learn from our experience, and don’t repeat mistakes.
• Technical excellence: Take the time to do things correctly, understand as much as possible about the systems we support, and share this knowledge with others.
• Community: the responsibility of a validator/block producer goes beyond simply signing blocks. We will contribute software, knowledge, and our time to help people in the community.
• Being a validator is not a zero-sum game. Active cooperation between validators benefits the network.

Rewards:

• We may claim as much as 75% of our rewards for liquidation. This is for several reasons: Our infrastructure is directly paid for using rewards. We are required to pay taxes, payroll, legal fees, and have other business-overhead.
• A sudden market downturn can leave our business with a tax bill that exceeds holdings.
• On chains where we hold a high percentage of stake, we will delegate to other validators that we feel add value.
• Not all chains we validate on are profitable, and often we use rewards from one network to bolster our self-stake on other networks.

Commission:

• Our lowest commission is 4%. Any lower than this is unsustainable for our operation.
• We do not promise any “slash protection” or incentives for delegations (such as buying votes, giveaways, or airdrops.)
• To date (May. 2022) we have never had a validator slashed for downtime or double-signing.

Cosmos Governance:

Block Pane will strive to actively participate in governance on all chains. In the case of Cosmos-SDK chains this is of particular importance and we understand the weight that our vote carries on behalf of our delegators. We are reachable on many social platforms, directly via e-mail, and are happy to consider the opinions of our delegators when voting, but will not act against the benefit of the network if we disagree.

Here is an explanation of what you can expect from us:

There are four possible votes we may submit.

1. Yes
2. No
3. No with veto
4. Abstain

Note: *The difference between a "No" and "No with veto" vote is that the depositor on the proposal could lose their deposit. This is generally an extreme reaction and used to discourage abuse of the governance system, or to counter outright malicious acts.*

Yes

This indicates that the proposal:

• Is reasonable
• Adds benefit to the network
• If requesting funds or community backing: is not excessive, is honest, stands on its merits, and includes clear objectives.
• For software updates it adds value, fixes issues, and has been tested.

No

In these cases a NO vote indicates that the proposal:

• Does not add value to the network
• Is an obvious conflict of interest
• Could cause harm to the network or value of the governance token
• Furthers centralization
• Introduces technical risks that could destablize the network

No with veto

It will be very rare that Block Pane will submit a veto. This is reserved for egregious cases where intentional harm is intended, the proposer is abusing the system, or outright attempts at theft of community funds.

Abstain

We view an abstain vote as a useful option and use it often. It is important for validators to ensure that vote thresholds are met but it may not be approprite in many cases to influence the outcome. It also signals that we are actively reviewing proposals but do not want to show a preference for several reasons:

• We have a conflict of interest, such as increasing validator commissions or incentivizing a liquidity pool for two chains on which we are validating.
• The proposal is not related to operation of the chain: such as minor adjustments of pool ratios or trivial issues that have no significant impact on the network.
• We are not qualified to vote due to complexity or cannot understand the implications.
• Withdrawing support/dissent for a controversial proposal without taking a side.

Dedication to Technical Excellence:

• Anticipate systems failure and design for resiliency.
• Monitoring is key, maximize instrumentation, react quickly to outages.
• Use past incidents to create preventative alerts.
• Scale laterally, distribute across multiple regions, providers, and platforms.
• Build and share useful tools for other validators to benefit from our experiences.

Beneficial Ownership

Block Pane, LLC. is based in the state of Colorado, USA and 100% of shares are owned by Todd Garrison.