According to the last announcement for adding a new Liquid Staking Validator, we had got an LSV application form for 2 weeks. Based on the scoring system that we opened and discussed on the commonwealth, we extracted the top 3 candidates out of 13 candidates.

Voting YES to this proposal means that you approve ‘AutoStake’ to be adopted as a new liquid staking validator.

only YES votes will be counted. Voting NO, NO WITH VETO, or ABSTAIN will have no effect on which candidate is adopted. (However, when the number of the voting amount is significantly different among each candidate, No votes can be reflected)

Voting procedures summary:

• Existing LSV should not vote, and votes by existing LSV will not be counted for this proposal
• Only one candidate that receives the highest number of CRE for ‘Yes’ voting, can only proceed to the next step
• The final validator needs to be agreed upon via on-chain governance(existing LSV need to vote)
• New LSV is added upon the passing of the governance proposal

Link to the docs for all candidates scoring:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1s8O1O_q_byugOOznhhUPQo9IM2YGxNbG/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=103096296126293453015&rtpof=true&sd=true

Here’s the scoring system that was discussed before: https://commonwealth.im/crescent-forum/discussion/5199-discussion-liquid-staking-validator-scoring-system

Qualitative Scoring Criteria submitted by AutoStake

How will you contribute to the Crescent Ecosystem in the future?

: 1. Big IBC Relayer https://ibc.autostake.net we are also in a somewhat unique position to add to our dedicate SecretNetwort IBC (strict hardware requirements 2. Daily pruned snaphots: http://snapshots.autostake.net/ 4. Seeds for all the chains we validate: http://snapshots.autostake.net/chain_id/seed.txt 5. Peers for all the chains we validate: http://snapshots.autostake.net/chain_id/peer.txt 6. Auto-Compounding staking: https://wallet.autostake.net 7. Explorer: https://explorer.autostake.net/ 8. LCD/REST API for all chains we validate: https://chain_id.mainnet.lcd.autostake.net:443

What is your long-term plan to sustain the Crescent node?

: We are already in a position where we are self sustaining

Infra specs and operation specs

: Baremetal Ryzen 3600, 64GB RAM, RAID-0 2x 500gb NVMe How is the validator key protected? We use a form of Secrets Management, so that the key is encrypted and only available to the validator process. How do you protect your servers? The normal stuff but quick overview: * External hardware firewall & internal software firewall (SSH port has whitelisted ip's) * Automatic security updates * Non-root users (including applications) * Yubikeys + 2FA where possible (SSH, Git, etc) Do you operate sentries? We do not believe this is effective architecture and it just adds latency and complexity which is an enemy; instead we use extra peer nodes to amplify connectivity and are on standy to firewall off validator P2P if an attack were ever to occur turning the peer nodes into sentry architecture Do we use Horcrux or Tmkms? Why Secrets Management over HSM? Again similar to the sentries this adds latency and complexity; and we have decided because of this is actually increases risk rather than diminish it; that being said this is still something we think about a lot internally and is under constant consideration. What monitoring & alerting tools do we use? We use all of the below stacks: 1. Prometheus + Grafana + Alertmanager 2. Panic Cosmos 3. Tenderduty

**Qualitative answers also can be found here :**https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F1lxjAP77ZkBdMFH6HMjP7HZGuHFnY05PJfGZdI63bM/edit?usp=sharing ****