Before we dive into the story of Calibr, we wanted to take a moment and tip our hat to Osmosis and Cosmos. These two chains and the communities around them helped introduce us to the IBC ecosystem. Folks like Tom from EcoStake, Sunny, Jack Zampolin., Cryptocito, Jacob Gadikian, the Game of Nodes crew and many others are the ones we learned from and take inspiration from. So, to all of you, thank you – you’ve changed our lives by introducing us to this whole new world and you are a huge part of the reason we could create Calibr.

In April of 2022, Calibr was “officially” formed when we validated our first block on the Chihuahua chain. There’s quotes on the word officially because we operate Calibr pseudonymously – meaning we, the founders, have personas, CryptoGardener and PurpleBuddha, but there is no official business entity. We do this to protect ourselves against influence on how we operate our validator or other aspects of our operations.

We picked the chain Chihuahua because of the low entry cost for starting a new validator – around $10,000 USD at the time – and because it offered a well written guide on how to launch a validator node. Since neither of the founding members of Calibr are engineers or even DevOps, it was helpful to have a step by step guide with clear instructions. Founder CryptoGardener (CG) took a week off the fiat-grind (work), learned how to run a node on bare metal and everything else that was needed to get Calibr’s first node up. The hardest part of setup turned out to be getting the operating system to play nicely with the validator software but once switched over to Ubuntu, issues were resolved and within a couple days of sitting down to learn from scratch, Calibr’s first node was up and running!

And that’s when we learned about the lava floor…