Use Your Spark were part of the first cohort of FTSO data providers on Songbird, when the network went live back in September-2021.
Since then we have participated in every single reward epoch on both Songbird and Flare. We are consistently among the top providers, as measured by reward rate and availability and work hard to support other participants within the ecosystem.
Throughout this time we have built a level of trust and support with our delegators and the wider Flare community, which drives us to continually improve the services that we offer.
As we embark on the the next phase of our Flare journey, we're excited to continue extending our services, primarily as a network validator and attestation provider, to the community, allowing us the opportunity to bring further value to the Flare ecosystem.
Since we began operating as an FTSO data provider, we have consistently remained among the top providers in relation to the reward rates that we offer to our delegators. We are proud to have achieved this without compromising our integrity, ensuring that the health of the wider network remains a priority. This is always a tricky balance, but one we feel we strike well.
After covering operational costs each month, we typically re-invest all of our token earnings into improving and expanding our service offerings. This allows us to improve our FTSO algorithms, build more resilience into our infrastructure, create educational content and much more.
Here on the UYS site we have a section focused on metrics and analysis, where you can find some useful chain related data and live FTSO prices, as well as some useful apps that offer insights into your rewards history and validator staking activity.
We have recently upgraded our Rewards App to include some exciting new features, including the option to delegate FTSO votes to any listed infrastructure provider, not just ourselves. We are also exploring the possibility of bringing staking capabilities to the app too. Watch this space!
Everything that we do is driven by the goal of bringing more value to the Flare community, whilst also making it easy for new communities and network participants to understand what Flare is all about and the utility it can bring to the wider crypto space.
As we reflect on our Flare journey so far, one thing that becomes very apparent is how our infrastructure setup has evolved and grown, as we've continued to learn and adapt to changes within the wider Flare ecosystem.
From the outset all of our infrastructure has been hosted by leading global cloud computing platforms, with our servers located in four cities around the world. The decision to take this approach was born out of a core set of architectural principles around resilience, redundancy, scalability, adaptability and control.
Within this framework all of our data feeds, servers, nodes, algorithms, databases and applications are proprietary and unique, built from the ground up by the team at UYS.
We continuously review our setup for maximum efficiency and robustness and adjust where necessary.
The section below offers an brief insight into the different elements of the UYS architectural ecosystem.
We operate primary and backup nodes for both Songbird and Flare, that are used solely for the running of our FTSO data provider services.
These nodes are located in different regions within our cloud based ecosystem, which ensures we have suitable redundancy in place, should there be any region-wide outages. Whilst this is a rare occurrence, it can happen, and we want to give our community the piece of mind that our services would continue to operate as normal, in such event.
Additionally, on Flare, we also run primary and backup validator nodes, again located in different regions within the ecosystem. These nodes have slightly different configurations to the FTSO nodes and as such, are used only for the purpose of validating transactions on Flare.
We have dedicated servers in place who's sole job is to host our FTSO price submitters.
These are where the smart contracts reside and are execute the FTSO price submissions for every price epoch.
One of the key elements to our infrastructure setup relates to the way in which we gather and process the relevant data for the FTSO.
Server-side applications manage the API connections we have in place with more than 15 cryptocurrency price providers. The majority of these connections useAPI's, however we do have a few integrations in place too.
These applications are configured to process the incoming streams of data in an orderly manner, filtering out anything that we consider not relevant or useful to our goals.
With over 1 million price datapoints coming into our system each day, it's important that we have a well structured database in place.
We continuously analyse the data we obtain, to try and improve the accuracy of the data that we feed into the FTSO system.
In order to be competitive and maximise the rewards that we can offer to our vote delegators, one of the key components of our FTSO system is the application that runs our algorithms.
Our algorithms are built in Python and run on dedicated servers within our ecosystem.
Flare State Connector system relies on a set of independent Attestation Providers (AP's) to fetch information from the real-world and deliver it to the Flare network.
To achieve this, AP's must run nodes for each of the supported chains.
We have each of these nodes in place, ready to start operating when the time comes. The currently supported chains are:
Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Litecoin, XRPL, Algorand and Stellar.
With all of the hardware and software we have in place to operate as a robust and resilient Infrastructure Provider, it's important we have a comprehensive monitoring system in place. This helps us not only discover problems quickly, but also allows us to conduct thorough investigations into any root-cause-analysis work that we need to conduct, in the aftermath of such problems.
Having this system in place allows us to offer continuous improvement to the services that we offer.
Our role as a network validator is something that we take very seriously. The primary role of a validator is to verify new transactions, thus ensuring it's security and reliability.
The work done by validators acts as barrier against fraudulent activities, as only transactions that meet the predefined criteria and are deemed valid are added to the blockchain.
In addition to our own robust security protocols that we have in place, the Flare team run regular security scans against all validators' nodes, ensuring continued compliance with the appropriate configurations.
The main interaction we have with the Flare community is via the X platform, where we are very active. It is here that we share things like educational content, Flare announcements, updates to our services, technical issues and much more. You can find us at @useyourspark - drop by and say hello; our DM's are always open.
You can also engage with us on Telegram at @useyourspark or via email at contact@useyourspark.com, where we would love to hear from you.
We don't like to sit still! Each day we look at ways we can do things better or more efficiently; whether it's making content more accessible, or calibrating our FTSO algorithms to produce better results. We believe that by constantly analysing what we do, it helps our learn, develop and grow.
It's also not just about reviewing our current products and services, we are constantly looking for new opportunities that could add value to the Flare community and the wider crypto industry as a whole. We have some exciting new products on our roadmap for 2024 and cannot wait to share them with you all!
