Block Producer Candidate
API Endpoint : https://api.eosio.cr
Code of conduct Ownership Disclosure bp.json
Mission
We challenge ourselves to provide the EOS platform with a strong geographical and political diversity by running the most robust bare-metal and self-funded EOS Block Producer possible from Costa Rica. We pledge to leverage our talent, experience, and sustainable Internet resources to meet such an important challenge.
Our Values
Education
Our philosophy has always been that knowledge and learning is key to what we do. Continuous training and building human talent is what will make EOS the most the most powerful infrastructure for decentralized applications.
Loyalty
We believe that our unique local relationships and reputation exponentially increase the viability of the EOS network. We recognize everyone's unique talents and seek to build loyalty by empowering our workforce.
Resilience
We are constantly in motion and have a proven history of evolving as technology improves. We value being nimble and efficient with our resources which allows us to quickly adopt and drive new innovations.
Liberty
We firmly believe that our history in Costa Rica, the longest lasting free democracy in Central America, shapes our philosophy of life, liberty and property. Values we wish to represent in the EOS community.
Tolerance
We work towards the flourishing of our community allowing all its members the right to Education, Entrepreneurship and Opportunity.
Prudence
We are committed to safeguarding the future of our community and put that above short term interests.
Accountability
We firmly believe in taking full responsibility for the consequences of our actions and encourage accountability from our stakeholders.
Equality
We will work for and defend a governance model where benefits are distributed according to merit regardless of race, gender, religion or political ideology and for the overall benefit of our community.
EOS Costa Rica pledges to :
- Provide the highest-standard bare-metal infrastructure possible to the ecosystem.
- Be self-funded and secure the investment needed to ensure a competitive EOS Block Producer.
- Allocate block rewards to EOS educational and development initiatives.
- Sponsor projects and dApps for community-led projects and developers.
- Be transparent and open on the allocation of block rewards.
- Actively participate in the governance of the blockchain with an open and positive attitude.
- Respect and defend the constitution, fair elections, community vigilance and arbitration mechanisms.
Network Redundancy
Fiber optic connections reach Costa Rica on both Pacific and Caribbean coasts via three submarine cables that provide the majority of bandwidth to Costa Rica. Access to all three backbones, ARCOS-1, MAYA-1, and Pan American Crossing (PAC) provides real time fail-over and redundancy at our facility. Additionally all 6 Central American nations are interconnected via a terrestrial fiber optic network (REDCA). Direct connections to all upstream carriers ensure that no single point of failure is present in the network.
The network employs BGP to assure all traffic reaches its destination if one connection fails. Communication to international connections is made fully redundant and supported in two locations, our main building in San Jose and the Teleport in Calle Blancos, approximately 7 kms away.
The EOS network will benefit from this infrastructure, which includes private peering network connections to major Internet carriers. These private peering arrangements allow the network to quickly and efficiently exchange packets of data with every major backbone carrier in a one-to-one environment.
“Costa Rica offers redundant fiber optic submarine cables at both shores.”
Political Environment
Costa Rica is the oldest democracy in Latin America and abolished its military in 1948.
Costa Rica stands for peace and liberty, characteristics that are internationally recognized and the cornerstones of the country.
Additionally Costa Rica has excellent infrastructure, a stable political framework, a flexible corporate structure coupled with a clear legal jurisdiction that we believe are perfect for the censorship-resistant network features of the EOS network.
Source: CINDE based on data from IMF, INEC, MEP
Source: World Bank, The Worldwide Governance Indicators, 2016.
Score: between 1-100
Infrastructure Overview
We are doing our part by reducing our carbon footprint to an absolute minimum.
Costa Rica leads the world in achieving carbon neutrality, expected by 2030. Costa Rica is already producing more than 90% of it's energy from renewable sources. (hydroelectric, geothermal, biomass, and wind)
Source: CINDE
Community Reinvestment
Costa Rica is committed to investing where it matters most with a public education policy that is free and mandatory since 1870. Costa Rica stands out for its high educational standards and outstanding productivity levels and we intend to replicate those values for the local EOS community. We have reached out to the communities in Panama and Guatemala in order to combine efforts and build the most significant EOS cluster in Central America.
We pledge to reinvest our block rewards following the same formula that has made our country a ideal business environment -- invest in a educational system for EOS developers, fund EOS startups that focus on innovation and partner with local Universities to increase research and development in the EOS ecosystem.
Source: World Bank, The Worldwide Governance Indicators, 2016. Score: between 1-100
EOS Costa Rica at a glance
Type of servers
EOS Costa Rica will deploy bare metal servers and storage devices to create a secure and redundant environment for the EOS network. This allows for full control over the infrastructure, with no dependency on third party hardware providers.
Location of servers
EOS Costa Rica has installed an EOS Block Producer node in San José, Costa Rica.
Exact Address: San José, Avenida 5, Calle 1
Coordinates: lat=9.936377, lon=-84.078155
Expansion Plan
We will install redundant infrastructure in a secondary location, Guatuso Data Center, El Guarco de Cartago, Costa Rica, 20km from the primary datacenter.
Testnets
Currently running two nodes in EOS Jungle Testnet. Additionally we are running a third node for testing alternate configurations and EOS versions.
Online Presence
Steemit: @eos-costarica
Twitter: @EOSCostaRica
Github: github.com/eoscostarica
Meetup: meetup.com/EOS-Costa-Rica
Telegram: t.me/eoscr
Discord: eoscostarica.io/discord
ID information
Account name: COSTARICAEOS
Legal Name: Sistemas Edenia Internacional
Location of company headquarters:
#501 Trifami, Avenida 1, Calle 2, San José, Costa Rica
Our Team
Rodrigo Fernández
Founder and Technical Lead
Rodrigo graduated from Tulane University in 1973 with a BS in Mechanical Engineering. He started Computer Programing using Fortran IV in IBM framework during his years at Tulane and fell in love with computers. In 1987 he founded a software development company Sistemas Edenia Internacional. In early 2013, he discovered Bitcoin and was heavily bitten by the "Crypto worm". The company is now running 2 BTC full nodes, DASH nodes, Stellar and Gridcoin nodes. Edenia also ran a Steem witness for over 3 months starting in 2016 and has had a Bitshares account since 2015. After using BitShares and Steem, Rodrigo gained lots of respect for Dan Larimer as a outstanding software engineer and thus his attraction to Mr Larimer’s latest project EOS.
Daniel Rojas
Community Relations
Daniel graduated from Universidad Latina in 2011 with a BS in Electronic Engineering. He worked for National Instruments Costa Rica from 2011 to 2017 helping engineers and scientists tackle challenges and drive the technical close of Radio Frequency sales opportunities. He heard about Bitcoin in early 2016 and began learning about it every single day. He downloaded several wallets and began playing with them and exploring whole ecosystem. In early 2017 he started the Comunidad Bitcoin Meetup, where he delivered monthly talks about Bitcoin, mining, wallets and security.In late 2017, he quit his job at NI to go all-in on crypto, with his main focus to boost cryptocurrency adoption through education.
Xavier Fernández
Senior Developer
Xavier graduated from the University of Costa Rica with a degree in Business Administration. Xavier has spent over 5 years working as a full stack developer and currently collaborates with all business stakeholders, as well as manages and optimizes hosting platforms to ensure expected availability and performance levels. He leads the developers, manages staging and production environments including data transfer, backup / recovery plans and deploys launch ready web applications. He also contributes to strategic planning, including business plan & tactics development. More recently, Xavier is vital to the implementation of nodes to supporting open and decentralized blockchain networks like EOS.
Ronald Gallo
Systems Administrator
Ronald holds a degree in Computer Science, and multiple certifications including Cisco. He is able to resolve issues when a problem is escalated by the NOC Techs. He solves problems that are outside the scope of the NOC, becoming the second line of defense when a problem is spotted. When new infrastructure or design is planned by the team it is Ronald that oversees the plan. Other work includes routine and non-routine maintenance as well as emergency repairs to keep the infrastructure running smoothly. As our main systems administrator, Ronald also provides support for large-scale customer implementations.
Gabriel “Gabo” Esquivel
Open Source Software Lead
Gabo is a proponent of open source technology stacks and decentralized applications (DApps). He believes that blockchain will have a cornerstone role in our society to build better, more efficient, fair, accountable and transparent organizations, communities and economies. He leads software engineering teams and also loves coding, particularly in JavaScript (Node.js, React) and more recently smart contracts for Ethereum and EOS. He co-founded BlockchainCR, a community hub for knowledge sharing, promoting and studying blockchain technologies.He is an EOS enthusiast and open source contributor to EOS Costa Rica.
Julio Madrigal
Service Technician
Julio has been with CR Servers for 16 years now and is responsible for managed services, and hardware support. He also works on-site for customer solutions such as administration and basic architecture. Julio is also our in-house web designer having made many important contributions to this website.
Edgar Fernández
Financial Resources
Edgar joined EOS Costa Rica from Bank of America Merrill Lynch where he was a Vice President based in New York. He led coverage of corporate clients in Latin America ex-Brazil and Mexico with a focus on Central America & the Caribbean. Previously, Edgar was a Vice President at Barclays covering institutional investors in Emerging Markets. Edgar holds a B.S. in Commerce from the University of Virginia with a concentration in Finance and Accounting. He is an avid “fintecher” with a special focus on the application of blockchain technology in finance. He has a vested interest in developing the entrepreneurial spirit and driving the use of technology to develop decentralized networks.
Alejandro Patterson
Developer Engagement
Over the last 10 years, Alex developed his entrepreneurial and business skills through a series of ventures, relationships, failures and successes. He is currently responsible for Lean Product Development helping us understand developer needs more intimately and ultimately join the EOS ecosystem.
Gerardo Barrios
Network Security Engineer
Gerardo plays a leading role designing and implementing the dedicated servers, routers, switches and secured private networks required for our EOS Block Producer cluster. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Systems Networking and Telecommunications from the University of Costa Rica. He has 10+ years working at the enterprise level with high-profile clients like Pfizer and Bank of America. He works as a Level 3 Network Security Engineer for AT&T Enterprise in Costa Rica. He has vast experience configuring, implementing and troubleshooting Firewalls, IPS, Proxies and web-filtering appliances. He also manages Linux and Unix servers. Gerardo is a long time crypto enthusiast and of course a big fan of EOS.
Rodolfo Përez
Creative Director
Rodolfo joined EOS Costa Rica as the Creative Director in 2017. He is responsible for the marketing, communication and business development efforts. He directs media relations, branding, advertising and website development. He manages and oversees sponsorships, events, charitable contributions, and marketing training. He has more than 16 years of experience in the digital marketing industry. Prior to joining the EOS Costa Rica he was an Art Director of one of the biggest digital agencies in Latin America.
Community & Testnet participation
Find us in the Jungle Testnet as junglemorpho
Testnet API endpoint :
https://jungle.eosio.cr
Telegram : Reach out to our team on telegram, we would love to hear from you. t.me/eoscr
GitHub : We are excited to build open source tools for the global EOS community. github.com/eoscostarica/
Community project timeline
We are actively communicating with the growing EOS community by way of our telegram channel and our discord channel providing updates and encouraging discourse on community projects. Our meetups and open source initiatives are community driven efforts that we are proud to support and welcome everyone to join us.
Our values available at the beginning of this website will guide our decision making around financing, transparency and community projects.
We also intend to hold block rewards in escrow until the community has demonstrated their support for proposals on our social media outlets. Our goal is to work towards the successful governance of the blockchain and be held accountable by holders, developers and the community in general.
Position on Dividends
We will reinvest 100% of the block reward back into the EOS network, adding value not just for us as block producers, but for the EOS network in the Central American region. Our goal is to attain this healthy balance between internal investment and external investment in the EOS ecosystem. It is important to cover our operating costs, attract and retain the best talent, and maintain a reserve buffer to face any price volatility.We will disclose the projected and actual percentages of funds allocated to the following expense categories:
Inward Facing Activities
- Server Hardware
- Connectivity Infrastructure
- Staff training both technical and non technical.
- Staff Compensation
- Office Rental for co-working space and classroom.
Outbound Activities
- Community Education hosting workshops, meetups, & bootcamps.
- DAPP development seed capital funding.
- Promoting EOS to businesses events, conferences, trade shows.
- Marketing social media, promotional items, events.
- Public Relations, as members of regional associations.
We will not be paying dividends or engage in vote buying. We have published our Pledge at the beginning of this website and look forward to community feedback on how we can improve and be held accountable.
Bare Metal Servers Specs
Our team has decades of experience managing servers and encompasses all the technical skills required to operate an EOS Block Producer 24/7 from Costa Rica. We are constantly thinking of ways to improve our infrastructure and have outlined the following technical roadmap, we will actively adapt our roadmap to network conditions and add capacity / redundancy as needed.
Primary and secondary block producer nodes :
- 4 x CPU 24 cores (48 threads) @ 1.87GHz
- 512 GB RAM
- 8TB SSD Storage in RAID 5
- 100 MBps uplink
We want to do our part to ensure the EOS network scales as smoothly as possible. We will allocate block rewards towards improving our hardware as one of our initial priorities in order to handle a large number of transactions and have redundant equipment ready to go at a moments notice. We envision the following scaling plan for hardware:
- 2 x CPU 28 cores (total 56 Cores and 112 threads) @ 2.50 GHz
- 1.5TB GB RAM DDR4–2666mhz
- 8TB SSD Storage in RAID 5
- 1GBs uplink
Technical Road map
Load Balanced Full Nodes :
We have provisioned two servers as load-balanced full nodes with our initial hardware setup to shield our producer nodes and respond in a timely manner to requests coming from users in our region. The number of nodes can be easily increased as demand increases.
In addition to providing reliable API endpoints used to query the EOS blockchain we plan to allow users to host files and query application databases. These services will become vital for applications to get the information they need without having to run and maintain their own scalable hosting services.
We look forward to the EOS token holder's support in order to continue with the deployment of full nodes to serve the demand of Dapps in Panama, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, in that chronological order.
We believe running full nodes in different countries in our region will significantly improve the resilience and responsiveness of EOS dApps used by millions of users in Central and South America.
Next steps for EOS Costa Rica
- EOS-specific educational courses to be held in in Edenia’s blockchain labs concept. Our plan is to bootstrap courses into a future EOS Academy.
- EOS fund with resources allocated to fund developers and EOS dApps. This will be under the established Edenia Incubator and will hold quarterly calls published on our social media platforms
- EOS partnership with the largest technical University in the country to promote research in the EOS ecosystem
- EOS Scholarship for high performing developers and systems engineers to begin or continue their studies and give back to the EOS community
- EOS-specific political fund that would provide resources to community leaders to work with policy makers and regulators to ensure a favorable environment for blockchain technology in Costa Rica.
We pledge to reinvest our block rewards following the same formula that has made our country a ideal business environment -- invest in a educational system for EOS developers, fund EOS startups that focus on innovation and partner with local educators to increase research and development in the EOS ecosystem.