February 01, 2025 • Moose Labs
In early 2025 we were honoured to be selected for cohort two of the Polkadot Decentralized Nodes programme.
The DN programme exists to widen the set of reliable, technically capable validators that help secure Polkadot. For us, joining cohort two was a useful external check on the way we operate: independent infrastructure, clear monitoring, fast response paths and a willingness to contribute back to the wider validator community.
Our selected Polkadot validators for the cohort were PROOF.COMPUTER/FUTUREPROOF and PROOF.COMPUTER/WEATHERPROOF. Both are part of the same operating philosophy we use across our validator fleet: keep the stack boring where reliability matters, make every alert actionable and avoid depending on a single provider or single operational assumption.
Cohort two also gave us a practical reason to keep improving the details that rarely show up in public dashboards. We reviewed failover procedures, tightened our upgrade rhythm and checked that our telemetry, paging and incident notes were good enough for a programme where responsiveness is part of the job.
Being selected again matters because decentralization is not only about the number of validators on a chain. It is also about who operates them, where they run, how much operational diversity exists underneath them and whether the people behind them stay engaged when the network needs attention. That is the work we want proof.computer to be known for.
We are grateful to Web3 Foundation and the DN committee for including us in cohort two. Our focus for the term is simple: run cleanly, communicate clearly and keep proving that small independent operators can contribute serious infrastructure to Polkadot.