Validator name
CoinChowder 
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) (@RealCoinChowder)
Staking Profile
(Harmony – Open Consensus for 10B )
Commission %
0% - Until Mandatory 5% at Epoch 826 (currently at 762)
Infrastructure Setup
Digital Ocean Cloud VPS
8 GB RAM/4CPUs Dedicated/160GB SSD+500GB Volume
Hosted - San Francisco
Contabo VPS (Redundant node)
30 GB RAM/8vCPUs/800GB SSD
Hosted - Germany
Average Sign Rate 99.95%
About us
I’m known in the community as Coin Chowder and I’ve been involved with Harmony since March 2021. My background consists of 10 years of managing web development teams. I went to university studying Maths/Statistics & International studies. To be honest, I chose that just for the International Studies part. I was decent at math so I thought I’d cruise through. I lived in Japan for a year as an exchange student before coming back home to Australia. Attained so much life experience there and it definitely has shaped who I am today. I quit university because I felt it was pointless, started working for a company as customer service, moving up to a team leader role, transitioning into a business analyst and now a development manager.
Describe how you were first introduced to Harmony
Well, how does anyone get introduced to crypto? Not going to lie, it was about money at first. I think I went through the standard path that most people get into. Leverage trade, get burnt, find good projects and HODL.
What really lured me to Harmony is that the founder had a vision for Universal Basic Income. This resonated with me because my mission in life is to be able to look after my family, and mainly my parents. My parents are first-gen immigrants to Australia. They sacrificed a lot of their time and money so they could set a solid foundation for me and my sister. Now that they’re on their pension, I feel guilty for not being able to do more for them. They’re humble and frugal, and treating them out for lunch or coffee will still result in a lot of nagging telling me not to waste my money on things like that. I’ve been looking for ways to build passive income and that’s how I landed on becoming a validator and staking in Harmony.
How would you do things differently?
Being a validator is not easy. Setting one up is, but being an elected one isn’t. If you had to pick from staking with me, or an enthusiastic unelected validator, I would suggest you stake with the latter. I’m lucky enough to have been blessed with some lovely delegators who I’m trying to know more about through my feedback forms. As an unelected validator, you really need to scramble your brain for ideas to attract delegators. It shouldn’t be that difficult, to the point where validators need to pay for prizes on top of running servers, just to power the network.
Validator Pledge
I don’t have much fancy stuff to say here. Just that all the commission that I get through my validator will be going to my parents to supplement their pension income. I will strive to keep the servers healthy and running all the time, and I wish to see Harmony succeed because the values behind it strongly resonate with me.