Adds flare.network validator to UNL

[jO-Osko]

Validator public key: nHUZRwL96AD7by5icnptu22KGbvDcN9pExAYwtMj1cpY2dsRfC4K

Operator / project: Flare networks

Support contact: [email protected]

1. Hosting and Infrastructure
   Validator is hosted on Google Cloud and was initially deployed in Belgium (europe-west1) region. Based on publicly available UNL validator information, we identified that validator.gatehub.net is also hosted in the same region. As a result, we migrated our validator to the Netherlands (europe-west4). This migration caused a few missed validations on December 23.
   Based on the public information available to us, we can therefore confirm that no other UNL validator is hosted on Google Cloud in the Netherlands (europe-west4) region.

2. Community Track Record
   Flare is an active and recognized contributor to the XRPL ecosystem in a variety of ways:

   • Flare blockchain hosts FXRP - the largest non-custodial wrapped version of the XRP token - with large DEFI activity and multiple yield opportunities.
   • As part of the FDC suite we develop and open source a variety of indexers related to payments, memo fields and transaction non existence.
   • Developing smart accounts - allowing the xrpl wallets to trustlessly control interactions on other chains in cooperation with major xrpl wallets.
   • We have provided open source contributions to the xrpl-py library.
   • We have recently started the validator node and are actively voting and reviewing the proposals.

3. Operational and Security Practices
   We maintain separate staging and production environments, enabling us to thoroughly test changes before deploying them to production and thereby reduce the risk of errors that could cause downtime. We adhere to the principle of least privilege by restricting SSH access through GCP IAP, implementing properly configured firewalls, enabling audit logging, carefully scoping service account permissions, and enforcing non-root runtime user permissions.
   Our infrastructure is monitored 24/7 using a custom monitoring solution. We have implemented custom health checks that continuously verify the status of our nodes. Alerts are configured to trigger on any sign of unhealthy behavior. These alerts are immediately dispatched to our engineering team via both Slack and PagerDuty. We maintain a professional on-call rotation with engineers ready to address any issues within minutes of an alert.
   The validator-keys.json file was generated on a secure machine and is now stored in offline cold storage. The generated validator token is securely stored in Google Cloud Secret Manager. It is fetched by the validator instance at runtime, and all access is logged and audited.

4. Uptime and Performance
   We are committed to maintaining exceptional uptime. Exceptions were December 23rd, when we moved the validator from Belgium to the Netherlands region and January 5th, when the rippled process was restarted to update the voting configuration: https://livenet.xrpl.org/validators/nHUZRwL96AD7by5icnptu22KGbvDcN9pExAYwtMj1cpY2dsRfC4K/history