LEGEND VBL Kusama proposal - Renewal

Name of node provider: LEGEND

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 active validators where one of them was accepted to the Polkadot Decentralized Nodes (DN) program.
• Kusama - 4 active 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: 2

The address of the node that wants to join the Validator Boost List and which network: GHewg8AxLL7JpRYDoqEyTk5bhGndhMvsDWo68St7D9YDH9Z
Dr9QwogB1x5BH91L4ebVnW2c8ZV9oQDfCRk4RUja5bTQjtH

Liquidity Contribution by VBL Applicant:
After running multiple validators on different DOTSAMA blockchains, we've decided to launch our 1st Bifrost collator as well. As already mentioned above, any network we validate we have significant 'skin in the game' because for us it's more than just validating and moving on. We believe that once you're also invested, you have high interest to make the network succeed. We committed to mint 20k DOT (further to ~100k we already minted so far) as described here https://bifrost.subsquare.io/posts/96, and to mint ~50k BNC as explained here - https://bifrost.subsquare.io/posts/102.

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.

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