Cerba

End of an era. Nearly six years ago, @trentdotsol and I were sitting in @garious14 's basement ordering computer parts on Newegg to hand-build the first metal validators for Solana. Mainnet was still a ways away, hardware and network requirements were unknown, docs, tools and best practices were nonexistent. Even Testnet was barely more than a periodic bringup of a handful of cloud VMs. Our tiny but mighty early validator community were basically all on a first name basis with one another. A few months later, Trent and I, along with a couple other early Solana Labs employees, racked the resulting 7 machines in a data center in Denver. These were the first ever colocated nodes to serve Solana. In early 2020, we used these glowing green machines to help serve the genesis block and launch Solana Mainnet into the world. Today, the data center that houses them is shutting down. Trent and I went over this morning to tear out the rack to discover we were the last remaining tenants in a now otherwise abandoned facility, with apparently a single staff member left on hand. It was a little emotional for me to see these shut down, even though they haven't been active on the network for a very long time, having been repurposed for development work a while back. It's always humbling to reflect on how far Solana has come in so little time - taking down a handful of old, wonky hand-assembled boxes from the genesis days and considering today's huge global reach of the network, the devs, the products, and especially, all of you. Thank you all for being along with us on the wildest ride.

StakePoint Preview 🥩 👈 We got @michaelh_laine and @cfl0ws speaking on our Navigating Governance panel! Hosted by Marinade's own @_Cerba 👏