TL;DR

This post is regarding the VBL renewal of Iceberg Nodes for:

• Bifrost Polkadot, for: vDOT, vBNC

Information

Name of node provider: Iceberg Nodes (or 🧊 Iceberg Nodes 🧊 as identity on-chain on most networks)

Brief Description on node provider: Iceberg Nodes provides secure non-custodial staking services on several networks, in particular as validators on relaychains and collators on parachains of Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems. The team members are highly involved in community activities (offline and online events organization, speakers at events, managing communities), governance on-chain, and technical support to project teams during various phases of their roadmap.

Networks, number, and addresses of the nodes that want to join the Validator Boost List:

• Polkadot, n°1 validator (already included in the actual VBL):

  • Identity: "🧊 Iceberg Nodes 🧊/V4”, address: 15cow6Uoq1KtBvyvRetuX52M1DepVpfVmc8qrpqCWH9grHdq, Fee: 10%, please note that 10% is the minimum fee enforced by the protocol, you can read more about our statement regarding this topic here. We are providing our services to Bifrost with the minimum possible fee, as we continue to do like in our past VBL slots where we provided Bifrost vDOT with 0% fee for most of the time. Also please note that there will be a 10,000 DOT minimum self-stake requirement for validators with May 31st as the definitive deadline (at the time of writing this post): we want like to highlight that all our validators will fulfill with this requirement before the deadline safely in time.

• Bifrost, n°1 collator (already included in the actual VBL):

  • Identity: "🧊 Iceberg Nodes 🧊\C1", address: 14ices1G5qTmqhMfDVBECh4jotNDGTLu8fhE9YktWT3cLF2F, Fee: fixed by the protocol.

Note: Please note that for vBNC VBL we are proposing only 1 collator instead of 3 (at opposite in our past VBL proposal), because due to recent change from 16 --> 8 active collator slots, we want to give also to other operators the opportunity to run a collator and improving the decentralization of the active collator set.

Liquidity Contribution by VBL Applicant:

We are long time Bifrost partners and so far we contributed ~5M ASTR, ~10k DOT, ~1k KSM, ~100k GLMR, ~6k MANTA and ~15k BNC during all these years. In doing that we used the various Bifrost vTokens in the DeFi fueling the partnership between Bifrost and various projects (like in Astar: with the recent Bifrost DApp Staking listing, that we supported, there was a direct increase of rewards for Bifrost).

Note: In addition to the past contributions listed above we will continue to contribute to various vTokens based on the opportunities and DeFi campaigns in which we will take part. BTW would be awesome to have the opportunity to vote in Astar OpenGov for vASTR holders.

Marketing - Informational support/contribution by VBL Applicant:

Iceberg Nodes is a co-founding member and/or admin in most Italian Telegram groups of the Italian community of Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems. The ecosystem is comprehensive of a series of Italian Telegram groups such as: Polkadot/Kusama Italia, Bifrost Italia, Astar & Shiden Italia, Moonbeam & Moonriver Italia, RMRK & Substrate NFT Italia, ChainX Italia, Acala & Karura Italia, Manta & Calamari Italia, Bit.Country & Pioneer Italia, KILT Italia, Totem Italia, OAK & Turing Italia, Aventus Italia, Pendulum & Amplitude Italia, Composable & Picasso Italia, Acurast Italia, etc.

Most of the groups above are “official groups” created by teams themselves and then assigned to us for managing and moderating.

Luca from Iceberg Nodes is active in the Italian community of Polkadot, and being the frontman was involved in tens of live video shows on YouTube, Spotify, Discord, etc., representing Polkadot. Michele from Iceberg Nodes is also helping with the Italian community sometimes, but he is mostly active in managing/helping people on international (official and unofficial) groups of the above projects.

Some of our previous initiatives supporting Bifrost:

• Technical support (leveraging our expertise in validators) and collaboration with Bifrost during the Polkadot/Kusama Asset Hub Migration for staking
• Direct and ongoing communication with the Bifrost team to discuss and provide support on various topics
• Administration of the Italian Telegram group of Bifrost (Bifrost Italia)
• Organized Bifrost Italia Community Live (one of the recording for example)
• More than 10 different live video shows on YouTube as guest of most important Italian crypto influencers speaking about Polkadot with a concise focus on Bifrost liquid staking solution (more details on Luca Poggi’s X account: LucaPoggi7)
• Organized the offline event at Crypto Expò Milan (CEM) in which Christian was also supposed to participate, but due to an unexpected event, he was unable to attend and Luca Poggi, in addition to his part, spent some words also about Bifrost and its role in the ecosystem (Twitter Link)
• Organized the offline event at Blockchain Week Rome (BWR24), unfortunately again Christian cannot attend the event (Twitter Link)
• Iceberg Nodes x Bifrost Referral Program using the sample URL: https://bifrost.app/vstaking/vTOKEN?r=icebergnodes (where you can replace vTOKEN for any of Bifrost available vTokens)
• Tens of translations of most important Bifrost tweets via Polkadot Arena Twitter account (Polkadot Arena) and reposted on Bifrost Italia Telegram group
• Translation of some of Bifrost medium articles on Polkadot Arena Blog
• Already LSD liquidity providers due to our previous VBL applications

As BNC holders and one of the first Bifrost collators, our target is to continue to support Bifrost.

At the scope of this proposal, we can provide the following educational initiatives around Bifrost:

• Help in managing the Italian Telegram group of Bifrost (Bifrost Italia), Thomas is already there as supervisor.
• Recommend Bifrost among the various options as an alternative to native staking, during the various discussions in Telegram groups and Discord channels, in live videos, at IRL events (for example the institutional Decentralized Lugano event) and to any interested community member, in particular detailing how the platform works, the available stake/unstake methods, notes about the security and the various possible uses of vTokens.
• Organize live video-call on Bifrost Italia Telegram group (Bifrost Italia) about Bifrost and its services.
• Any other initiative (optional) that will be carried out and of interest to Bifrost will be included in the report.

With such initiatives our main focus is to educate people about Bifrost's product and increase the Bifrost community and users!

Other:

We will do our best to ensure the nodes' performance. At the time of writing this proposal, we never had slashing on our Polkadot and Kusama validators (you can check on Subscan looking at the “Rewards” tab or any other monitoring tool for those chains) and we are providing our staking services at A+ grade.

Best Regards
🧊 Iceberg Nodes 🧊 Team