LEGEND VBL Polkadot proposal - Renewal

Name of node provider: LEGEND (Polkadot)

Brief Description on node provider: Node Runner FZCO is a stake-as-a-service company based in Dubai, UAE. It operates multiple validators under the “LEGEND” brand, focused on DOTSAMA ecosystem, such as:

• Polkadot - 3 validators where one of them was accepted to the Polkadot Decentralized Nodes (DN) program.
• Kusama - 4 validators where two of them were accepted to the Kusama Decentralized Nodes (DN) program.
• Moonbeam - 2 active collators.
• Moonriver - 1 active collator with a plan for launching a second collator in the following months.

In any network we validate, we have significant skin in the game to show our full engagement. For example, our self bond in three of our Polkadot validators is approximately 37k DOT combined, and in each one of them we keep accumulating our rewards. The point is that we’re putting ourselves together with our nominators in the same boat, and if our validators for any reason will underperform - we’ll suffer from it first. Therefore we spare no efforts to have the best performance, running our own infra and have a 24/7 nodes monitoring system.

Number of nodes that want to join the Validator Boost List: 1

The address of the node that wants to join the Validator Boost List and which network: 15B3UVXPRp3yS2gU7GogS41mwoT2fTL1KaNYPF7eMVjjWZJJ

Commission: 3%

Liquidity Contribution by VBL Applicant:
We minted so far around 100k DOT (~$800k in current date), and also provided liquidity for a long period of time (on stellaswap). We expected to mint more DOT & GLMR but was waiting for Hydration to finalize their Money Market app for lending & borrowing. Once it’ll be ready, we expect to mint about 20k DOT in the following 6 months in the following schedule:

• 11k DOT once vDOT is available for is available on hydration in their lending/borrowing platform.
• 1.5k DOT every month for 6 months

General Contribution by VBL Applicant:
We are always thinking about how to improve the Bifrost ecosystem and also got elected to become an INFRA fellowship member. When we noticed that some MOVR collators don’t perform properly, we published the following article collator selection improvement suggestion - MOVR as a study case (26/9/24) and suggested some recommendations to have better criteria in order to select collators. We also suggested in the following article Increase the number of Polkadot VBL seats (12/9/24) to boost the Bifrost ecosystem by having more dedicated validators.
Our point is that as mentioned before - we’ll always keep thinking how to improve the Bifrost ecosystem and will spare no efforts to do it by ourselves as well.

We really hope for your support, exactly as we received from you in our previous proposals, and wish we can help Bifrost together grow bigger and stronger!

Thanks,
Rafael