Important announcement: Node migration to a new provider request

Node Operators
1

ISP MIGRATION

Dear operators,
There has been continuous problems with Stark industries and its subsidies like PQ.hosting and TheHosting.

Problem

1. Stark industries is on a sanction list by EU

Therefore it’s a liability for people to purchase and use their services. They keep making new subsidies and play cat and mouse game with the regulations, but this will likely never end as The EU sanctions on Russian companies prohibit European companies from doing business with them, and this applies to both direct and indirect provision of services Moldova.

The European Union has imposed strict sanctions against Stark Industries and the two individuals running it for enabling “destabilising activities” against the Union

2. Stark Industries was added to spamhaus.org list

As you can see at spamhaus.org/drop/asndrop.json, the provider had been put to spamhaus list.

{"asn":44477,"rir":"ripencc","domain":"stark-industries.solutions","cc":"MD","asname":"THE-HOSTING"}

3. Centralisation problem

Currently ~130 nodes are on their services which is a big liability for the network and for the operators (40.2M NYM staked).

4. Stark industries has a questionable history

After a closer look, we found out that Stark Industries Solutions appeared two weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and became the epicenter of massive DDoS attacks on government and commercial targets IPIP.NET Bleeping Computer, Stark Industries Solutions Ltd. - OpenSanctions.

SOLUTION

We understand that operators cannot know the history of every ISP and that people want to run a good service for affordable price.

Nym Network has been, is and will be permission-less and the operators can run services of their choice. However, as a team we support operators via Delegation Program (DP) and Service Grant Program (SGP) and we would like to see operators looking for an alternative solution and moving away from the services provided by Stark Industries.

I am aware that it won’t be easy and that some of you are prepaid for a month or two ahead and that this will take some collaborative effort to find multiple ISPs instead of moving all the nodes concerned to the same one.

I would like to ask all of you running nodes on the above mentioned provider to:

  1. Research alternatives (same specs, location etc)
  2. Communicate with me or mentors if this affects your quality or grant size and how, before any purchase
  3. Share your findings, preferably by submitting a pull request to the ISP list like documented here: Where to host your nym-node? - Nym docs
  4. Migrate to a new provider