These five node providers appeared in November 2023. They all have seven node machines, and are hosted mainly in Riga, Madrid, Lisbon, Warsaw and Talinn.
George Bassadone who I suspect is involved with this, along with his wife Geeta and business associate Bianca-Martina (Tina) Rohner (GeoNodes LLC) also
hosts in Vilnius. He was also in Madrid with Saikat Das from DOLR AI, and was in Miami when excess nodes were recently transferred to an associate
of Aviate Labs (who also own a tonne of nodes).
Currently around 200 of the active nodes in the NNS are controlled by entities linked to George Bassadone and other related people who shall
remain nameless (but only own 64 things or something like that, and they’re all black.)
Critical Subnets :
I’m not going to link in anybody other than George & co and these 5 fake accounts, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. If there’s a link to Aviate Labs then the situation is much worse than I thought. If the node providers that are in both India & Canada (places frequented by the DOLR AI team), Rivram and Marvelous Web3, then that’s also not good.
As you can see we’re a couple of colluding node providers away from handing the control of the IC over to a small group of people. Yes, I think they have extremely malicious intent. They want to take their data centers and split off from the IC, onboard people via DOLR AI, and short the ICP price into the ground, as they’ve been doing since genesis.
My suggestion is that these five obviously fake node providers are deregistered immediately, and a full investigation is carried out into Node Provider sybil attacks, collusion, and get these people off the network permanently. The big brains at Dfinity can work out how to do it!
Also how did these node providers manage to get their machines on the critical subnets? How did they game the system and how can it be made more resilient to these attacks.
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https://icpump.fun/ - Anyone can create their own token in seconds. No gas, no bonding curve. An ICRC 1,2,3 compliant token in seconds
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The frontends for these are hosted off chain to be able to use server-side rendering using Leptos, a Rust based WASM framework. The code and deployment details for all of it can be found here:
The entire backend for this is hosted on IC canisters using a massively multi canister architecture. The code for it can be found here:
We currently have the largest fleet of IC canisters, close to around 500k canisters across all the general app subnets. This is owing to us having an architecture that spins up a single canister every time a user signs up with us across any of the above 4 apps.
Naturally, this incurs a significant cost as can be seen here
So, we’ve been wracking our brains all this time and iterating constantly and vehemently trying to figure out different hyper-scale architectures that can drastically reduce costs for us while still letting us maintain the kind of distributed scale we’ve been trying to solve for.
DOLR ai is our attempt at doing just that.
It’s a way for us to have a unified backend that uses the IC while providing APIs that multiple frontends can use simultaneously.
This is the very reason why we’ve built a home grown identity solution that shares the same principal across all these frontends. You’ll notice that logging into all of the above apps and navigating to your profile from the menu will give you the same principal ID and the same wallet
This is also the reason why we’ve always INSISTED on a single-user, single-canister architecture even though we’ve been advised against it by Dfinity engineering because ultimately we wanted to be able to host multiple apps for a single user from the same backend canister and have a single user’s data be neatly isolated to their personal canister
We are a small team that has always been IC first and intend to remain that way for decades. Our entire app and DAO is built on top of it and there’s no way for us to have any malicious intent around it.
We are a team of 10-12 odd engineers based out of India at Dolr ai and it is humanly IMPOSSIBLE for us to take over a network of such sheer size, brilliance and capability.
Some additional points of clarification:
Meeting with George
The Dolr ai team have personally attended 2 IC Labs (1st on scaling, 2nd on DAOs) hosted by Dfinity at Zurich at their headquarters at different times in the last couple of years. We have met multiple ecosystem teams and Dfinity engineers at these events and have made valuable professional connections during these events and after.
However, as an Indian citizen, obtaining a Schengen Visa is relatively difficult as we can only obtain business Visa(s) valid for 15 days. So, we’ve been applying to Spain for a Digital Nomad Visa and that is how I happened to be in Madrid.
I have been part of the IC ecosystem sometime since genesis.
I have since then been actively learning, participating and contributing to everything IC
Since the IC ecosystem is a closely knit group, almost all active participants know each other owing to them attending events that are relevant to the IC
George and I met at Dfinity the first time during the first IC Lab that I attended. He was non-technical but an investor and a node provider.
George is a seasoned real estate investor with over a decade of experience in real estate. He is uniquely placed to provide his expertise on fractionalizing real estate and we would provide our expertise for scalable Dapps and undergoing the SNS. Tina who is the other co founder of EstateDAO brings their years of experience with compliance and is well placed to provide their legal expertise as compliance was a primary hurdle that needed to be solved for fractionalizing real estate via NFTs. This is how EstateDAO was born and we’ve been providing scaling/technical guidance for EstateDAO since then
At the time, he was visiting Madrid. Since the beginning of our relationship, George and us have had a cordial professional relationship. He is a friend, an ardent supporter, an early investor and a partner from EstateDAO.
That is our primary relationship with George and the reason for our meeting.
Connection with node providers
I have NEVER MET any of the above listed names apart from George Bassadone, his wife (on a single occassion) and Tina Rohner for our work related to EstateDAO
I am primarily based out of Kolkata, West Bengal, India
Both of them seem to be based out of Canada and I’ve yet to visit Canada personally.
Shorting IC
Since our SNS, we’ve utilized around 450k ICP. Out of which we’ve paid around 800k-1M$ in cycle costs. The rest has paid for salaries primarily, cloud/software/GPU costs and then minor miscellaneous costs.
As a team and a DAO, our primary responsibilities are towards the upkeep and continuity of the DOLR ai SNS DAO and subsequently to the ICP NNS DAO.
I am truly in shock at the claims made in this post, though I respond not with outrage, but with a commitment to setting the record straight. It is one thing to raise concerns about the decentralization of the network, but it is quite another to make unfounded accusations that distort reality and misrepresent my role in the ecosystem.
Let me be absolutely clear: I have no relationship with the individuals mentioned: Artem Horodyskyi, Bohatyrov Volodymyr, Ivanov Oleksandr, Maksym Ishchenko, or Vladyslav Popov. I do not know them and have never heard of these names before. Where are they? Why doesn’t someone reach out to them?
Furthermore, my presence in Miami was for a clear and publicly verifiable purpose, I was there to meet with Real Vision. Upon my return, I introduced Pierre Samaties and Paul Meeusen of Dfinity to Jamie Coutts, Chief Crypto Analyst, Real Vision on a conference call. Jamie later tweeted about ICP: https://x.com/jamie1coutts/status/1895338452557922396?s=48
Similarly, I travelled to Madrid to meet with Saikat and other members the team from DOLR.ai, who were applying for their Spanish residency, as clarified above.
I’d like to request an investigation into this accusation as it is important to clear my name. I firmly stand by my contribution to the ecosystem and will continue to support its long-term success through transparency and constructive engagement.
People with only one template post, should not have even a single node in a subnet with test canisters, let alone be involved in validating ledgers and governance.
CPN : The number of nodes on critical subnets (non application) divided by the total nodes managed by that NP
CS : The percentage of nodes that the NP has on critical subnets
Intro : Whether the initial form introduction used “Good health”, “Wishing you all the best” or “I hope this message finds you well” in addition to the standard boilerplate.
These are the first two red flag criteria that I thought about, I’m sure there’s more. I haven’t even dug into the IC wiki with the bank details. How many just submitted the front page of a bank statement as evidence.
