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Set Up a Validator

Welcome to the official, in-depth Edgeware guide to validating. We're happy that you're interested in validating on Edgeware and we'll do our best to provide in-depth documentation on the process below. As always, reach out on Discord or Telegram if you have questions about the project.

This document contains all the information one should need to start validating on Edgeware using the command line interface. We will start with how to setup one's node and proceed to how to key management and monitoring. To start, we will use the following terminology of keys for the guide:

  • stash - the stash keypair is where most of your funds should be located. It can be kept in cold storage if necessary.
  • controller - the controller is the keypair that will control your validator settings. It should have a smaller balance, e.g. 10-100 EDG
  • session - the 4 session keypairs are hot keys that are stored on your validator node. They do not need to have balances.

Requirements​

  1. You will need 6 keypairs: a stash (ed25519 or sr25519), controller (ed25519 or sr25519), and 4 session (3 ed25519 and 1 sr25519) keypairs. You can generate these using the subkey utility. We will be using derived keys in the examples, if you do not use derived keys, simply input the seed/mnemonic needed to sign from these accounts.
  2. Aura keys (ed25519)
  3. Grandpa keys (ed25519)
  4. ImOnline keys (ed25519)
  5. AuthorityDiscovery keys (sr25519)
  6. You will need at least the existential balance (1,000,000,000,000,000 token units i.e 0.0001 EDG) in both the stash and controller accounts plus the balances needed to send transactions from these accounts.
  7. You will need a live, fully-synced Edgeware node running with the --validator flag that has set one's session keys, either before or after you complete the onboarding process.

Pre-requisites​

  • First follow the guide in the README.md for installing and running the edgeware-node.

  • Download from source or from the npm registry the edgeware-cli located here.

    Note: edgeware-cli has several dependencies viewable here.

  • Install subkey as well if you do need to generate new keypairs:

    cargo install --force --git https://github.com/paritytech/substrate subkey

From this point on, we will assume you are familiar with using subkey, if that is not the case, you can read about the subkey commands here.

Onboarding​

  1. First, create the stash and controller keypairs using subkey. You can also optionally **create your 4 session keys. Create ED25519 keypairs using -e flag with subkey.

  2. Next, you will need to bond from your stash keypair to your controller keypair. Using the CLI and a local node, you will run:

    edge -s <STASH_SEED> staking bond <CONTROLLER_B58_ADDRESS> <AMOUNT> <REWARD_DESTINATION>

  3. The stash seed should be a mnemonic + derivation path for your stash keypair

  4. The controller address should be a Base58 encoded public key (starts with a 5)

  5. The bond amount should be an integer balance in units of EDG

  6. The reward destination is where rewards will go; the options are stash, controller, and staked (where staked adds rewards to the amount staked)

  7. Next, you will need to set your validator preferences from your controller account. Using the CLI and a local node, you will run:

    edge -s <CONTROLLER_SEED> staking validate <COMMISSION_PERCENTAGE>

  8. The controller seed should be a mnemonic + derivation path for your controller keypair

  9. The unstake threshold is the number of times your node is offline before dropping out

  10. The commission percentage is the percentage of rewards you will

  11. Next, you will need to set your session keys from your controller keypair. Using the CLI and a local node, you will run:

    edge -s <CONTROLLER_SEED> session setKeys <OUTPUT_FROM_ROTATE_KEYS> 0x

  12. The controller seed should be a mnemonic + derivation path for your controller keypair

  13. The session public keys should be concatenated from the output of the rotate keys rpc command.

Examples of all the commands are below:​

In the following, we have downloaded and compiled edgeware-cli from source to yield a /bin/edge binary. You can use tsc to do so if you compile from source.

edge -s "axis service this custom because top clap sock weekend tenant vehicle merge" staking bond 10 stash // bond 10 EDG (10 * 10^18 currency units)

edge -s "axis service this custom because top clap sock weekend tenant vehicle merge" session setKeys 0fea2a18acbd19e4a21c3ae29ecefee61d32d46dc4b9a9c5ccecbbbdff7b0a7e8e55bd3035d18f40d8dd1b5d940c47066ddb6f37ec7261d69121e8353d612d1410f7b7f954b3225b148c5de650e0bc3c941ae65e1557c3805c3b0df37285c3892cc2f99d97254ffdf1640c29dff2c6272dbf4dc8dedb46e43ba0bd12ab269b3c 0x // set session keys to the 4 concatentated keys submitted

edge -s "axis service this custom because top clap sock weekend tenant vehicle merge" staking validate 10 // set validator preferences to 10% commission

Validating​

The v099 testnet requires validators to manage 4 validating keys for the Aura, Grandpa, ImOnline, and AuthorityDiscovery modules.

  1. Aura keys (ed25519)
  2. Grandpa keys (ed25519)
  3. ImOnline keys (ed25519)
  4. AuthorityDiscovery keys (sr25519)

Now while running your full node to sync or afterward, you can start to set up your session keys for the node. The command for inserting keys and rotating keys is the same as it has been. To rotate new session keys, run the following while your node is running:

curl -H 'Content-Type: application/json' --data '{ "jsonrpc":"2.0", "method":"author_rotateKeys", "id":1 }' 127.0.0.1:9933

To insert existing session keys, you can run for each key the following command while your node is running:

curl -H 'Content-Type: application/json' --data '{ "jsonrpc":"2.0", "method":"author_insertKey", "params":["KEY_TYPE", "SEED", "PUBKEY_HEX"],"id":1 }' localhost:9933

The four key types you will enter individuals are:

  • aura for Aura keys
  • gran for Grandpa keys
  • imon for ImOnline keys
  • audi for AuthorityDiscovery keys

After running these curl commands, you should receive as output from stdout the public keys you provided (or didn't) in a JSON string. That also means the process was a success! You should now see yourself in the list of newly/pending validators to go into effect in future sessions. In the next era (up to 1 hour), if there is a slot available, your node will become an active validator.