2025 Recap: A Year of Building, Breaking, and Learning

2025 Was Not an Easy Year

2025 was not an easy year.

There were days where everything ran quietly in the background, and days where nothing did. From the outside, running validator infrastructure often looks stable. Blocks keep coming, dashboards stay green, and things seem calm. From the inside, it rarely feels that way.

This year was full of upgrades, broken assumptions, late-night fixes, and decisions that could not really be postponed. It was not about chasing growth or trying to look big. It was mostly about staying reliable, even when things felt messy, and continuing to build something that could actually last.

Starting Small, With One Network and One Server

At the beginning of 2025, AstroStake was running on a single testnet, on a single server.

That one server handled everything at once: the testnet validator, RPC, API, and whatever contribution could realistically be done at the time. There was no separation of roles, no redundancy, and no safety net.

It was not pretty, but it worked well enough to learn. The goal back then was simple: be useful, stay online, understand how things break, and fix them before they break again.

From One Server to Real Infrastructure

As the year went on, that setup slowly started to change.

Today, a single chain no longer runs on one overloaded machine. Instead, it is split into clearer roles: validator nodes, RPC, API and gRPC servers, and snapshot engines. Each role exists for a reason, mostly learned the hard way, and each one has its own failure boundaries.

If the main validator server goes down, the validator can temporarily rely on RPC infrastructure with stricter rate limits until the primary node is back online. If an RPC server fails, snapshot services can take over while snapshot generation is paused. Every scenario has alerts, and those alerts actually mean something.

None of this appeared overnight. It came from incidents, mistakes, and repeatedly asking the same uncomfortable question: what breaks next, and how bad will it be when it does?

Community Contribution Changed Everything

The first testnet where AstroStake really took community contribution seriously was 0G Labs.

At that time, there was no plan to build a brand or push a validator. The focus was simply to help the network and other operators run more reliably. Very early on, one issue stood out clearly: RPC infrastructure was under heavy pressure. Storage node usage was high, RPC traffic spiked, and many public endpoints were either slow or completely down.

That situation pushed me to focus on tooling around RPC reliability. What started as basic checks slowly turned into a set of tools: auto-install scripts, sync and uptime monitoring, storage node tooling, faucet services, snapshot infrastructure, and public RPC, API, and gRPC endpoints.

Looking back, the most impactful contribution was also one of the simplest.

At its core, it was a basic RPC Monitoring Dashboard. Nothing fancy. No complex features. It simply showed which RPC endpoints were slow, which ones were down, and which ones were still usable. But at that time, that simplicity mattered. Operators needed visibility. Knowing which endpoints actually worked saved time and reduced a lot of frustration.

That experience made something very clear to me: fixing a real problem, even with a simple tool, can matter far more than building something impressive on paper.

As usage grew, the infrastructure was tested under real load. At peak, AstroStake’s public RPC infrastructure handled more than 10,000 requests per second, with daily bandwidth usage reaching around 3 TB. It was the first time the setup was truly stress-tested by real users, and it held up.

From those contributions, I was given the Navigator role in 0G Labs, along with the first meaningful reward AstroStake received. That reward did not come from validator operations, but from providing infrastructure and tooling that the network genuinely relied on.

That moment became a turning point. Not because of the reward itself, but because it proved that consistent, practical contribution, even when it starts small and simple, could sustain AstroStake and allow it to keep building.

Making It Sustainable

Contribution alone is not enough if it cannot be sustained, and that became clear pretty early on.

Running infrastructure has very real costs. Servers are not cheap. Bandwidth is not free. Time and attention are limited, especially when you are operating alone. Ignoring that reality does not make the work more meaningful, it just makes it fragile.

The goal was never to extract as much value as possible. It was to keep AstroStake alive without cutting corners. Validator commissions, delegations, and carefully managed public infrastructure made it possible to keep operating, reinvest, and sometimes slow down when slowing down was the safer choice.

Some services stay public and free because they genuinely help networks grow. Others are rate-limited, not to gatekeep, but to protect the infrastructure itself. Every decision sits somewhere between contributing and being responsible.

Looking back, most technical decisions in 2025 followed the same principle: contribution creates responsibility, and responsibility demands systems that can be trusted.

Automation Became Survival

Automation stopped being a nice-to-have very quickly.

As more networks were added, upgrades became more frequent, configurations became more complex, and the number of things that could fail quietly kept increasing. Manual processes just did not scale anymore.

Over time, scripts replaced memory. Monitoring became stricter. Alerts became more actionable and less noisy. Snapshot creation, service restarts, health checks, and routine maintenance gradually shifted from manual work to systems that could be relied on.

Without automation, operating multiple networks as a single operator simply would not be sustainable.

Zero Slashing Is Not Luck

Zero slashing incidents are often described as luck, but that is not really accurate.

It is also important to be honest here. AstroStake has experienced slashing before, but not on a public network. It happened on a private mainnet during early configuration testing, where the uptime window was extremely small. At the time, the parameters allowed only a 100-block window with a minimum uptime of 50%, meaning missing more than 50 blocks was enough to trigger a slash.

That incident happened during testing, when assumptions were still being validated and systems were not yet hardened. What mattered was what came after. Since then, there have been no slashing incidents on public testnets or mainnet validators, and monitoring, alerts, and upgrade procedures became much stricter.

At the same time, zero slashing is not something to promise blindly.

AstroStake operates with the assumption that failures are always possible. Because of that, slashing is treated as a risk to be owned, not ignored. In the event of a slashing incident, AstroStake has a slashing and delegator protection policy in place.

Validator reports are designed to capture slashing events, calculate the impact, and transparently report any losses. If a slashing event occurs due to operator fault, the loss will be reimbursed according to that policy.

Zero slashing on public networks is not about claiming perfection. It is about preparing for failure, isolating risk, and taking responsibility when trust and stake are involved.

From Docs to an Ecosystem

In the early days, AstroStake was mostly documentation. That documentation mattered, but it did not stay that way for long.

Over time, guides turned into a main website, a hybrid explorer with a custom light indexer, an EVM validator explorer for 0G, faucet services, and various public dashboards and tools. None of this was built just to look complete. Every piece existed because something was missing before.

The Birth of Linknode

Around the middle of 2025, it became clear that public infrastructure deserved its own focus. That was when Linknode was born.

LinkNode focuses on public infrastructure like RPC, API, gRPC, and snapshot services, with more planned over time. This separation brought clarity. AstroStake could focus on validator operations and network participation, while LinkNode handled the growing demand for reliable public infrastructure.

Consistency, Even in the Small Details

One of the less visible, but important, changes was consistency.

Snapshot links, genesis files, and addrbooks used to live on different servers with different URLs. Over time, this was cleaned up. Today, a simple URL like:

http://snapshots.linknode.org/lumera/snapshot

redirects cleanly to a regional backend such as:

https://snapshots-eu-central-1.linknode.org/mainnet/lumera/lumera_snapshot.tar.lz4

The same approach applies to genesis files, addrbooks, and other resources. These details may seem small, but they reduce confusion, simplify maintenance, and make infrastructure easier to trust.

Not Everything Went Well

Not every experiment worked. Some setups were over-engineered, some networks did not justify the resources, and some nights were longer than expected.

Still, every failure left something behind, whether it was better documentation, stronger systems, or clearer decision-making for the next iteration.

Where AstroStake Stands Today

As 2025 comes to an end, AstroStake is operating 6 mainnet chains and 7 testnet chains.

It is still a single-operator setup, still without shortcuts. What changed over the year is not ambition, but maturity.

Why This Still Matters

There were moments in 2025 when stepping back would have been easier.

Running infrastructure alone means carrying responsibility without handoff. When something breaks, there is no one else on call. When an upgrade fails, there is no fallback to another team. The systems may be automated, but the accountability is not.

What keeps AstroStake moving forward is not the number of chains or the metrics on a dashboard. It is the belief that reliable infrastructure matters, and that contributing consistently, even when it is quiet and unseen, is worth the effort.

AstroStake exists because I care about building things that work, even when no one is watching, and even when it would be easier to stop.

Looking Toward 2026

2026 will not suddenly be easier. But AstroStake enters the next year with stronger systems, clearer priorities, and confidence built from experience rather than assumptions.

The goal remains the same: operate reliable infrastructure and support networks that are worth building on.

Closing

Thank you to every project, delegator, and community member who trusted and supported AstroStake throughout 2025.

Whether it was running nodes, testing tooling, reporting issues, or simply using the infrastructure when it mattered, your involvement shaped how AstroStake operates today.

2025 was a challenging year, but it was also a memorable one. It came with a lot of learning, mistakes, and lessons that continue to shape how AstroStake is built and operated.

Built by node runners.
For the networks we believe in.