Run BSC Validator¶

Validator Hardware Requirements¶

Mainnet¶

VPS running recent versions of Mac OS X or Linux.
IMPORTANT 3T GB of free disk space, solid-state drive(SSD), gp3, 8k IOPS, 500 MB/S throughput, read latency <1ms (if start with snap sync, it will need NVMe SSD).
16 cores of CPU and 64 gigabytes of memory (RAM).
Suggest m5zn.3xlarge or r7iz.4xlarge instance type on AWS, or c2-standard-16 on Google cloud.
A broadband Internet connection with upload/download speeds of 5 megabyte per second

Testnet¶

CPU: 4core, Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8175M CPU @ 2.50GHz
Memory: 16 GB
Disk: ~1.5 TB
Network Bandwidth: Upto 25 Gbps
EBS Bandwidth: Upto 9.5 Gbps

Setup Validator Node¶

1. Install BSC Fullnode¶

Follow the instructions here to set up a full node.

2. Prepare Accounts¶

Two accounts require preparation before running a validator: the Consensus account and the BLS Vote account. Ensure these accounts match the corresponding ones when creating a new validator.

Generate Consensus Address¶

To create a new mining consensus account, run this command and set a password for the account:

geth account new --datadir ${DATA_DIR}

DATA_DIR: Where your key store files are saved.

If you already have a consensus account, skip this step. Save the password in a file named password.txt:

echo {your-password for the consensus account} > password.txt

Generate BLS Vote Address¶

To set up a new BLS account, use this command:

geth bls account new --datadir ${DATA_DIR}

DATA_DIR: The directory to store your key store files.

If you already have a BLS vote key, you can create a BLS wallet and recover it with the keyfile using:

geth bls account import ${KEY_FILE} --datadir ${DATA_DIR}

To retrieve your bls address, run:

geth bls account list --datadir ${DATA_DIR}

Save the password in a file named blspassword.txt:

echo {your-password for the BLS wallet} > blspassword.txt

3. Start Validator Node¶

Warning: Please do not expose your RPC endpoints to public network!

Start your validator using the command line below:

geth --config ./config.toml --datadir ./node --syncmode snap -unlock {accounts to sign txs, including your mining account at least} --miner.etherbase {the address of your mining account} --password password.txt --blspassword blspassword.txt --mine --vote --allow-insecure-unlock --cache 18000

Post Running¶

1. Monitor node status¶

To get started quickly, run GethExporter in a Docker container.

docker run -it -d -p 9090:9090 \
  -e "GETH=http://mygethserverhere.com:8545" \
  hunterlong/gethexporter

2. Update validator profile¶

You can submit a PullRequest to this repository to update your information: https://github.com/bnb-chain/validator-directory

Reference: https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/6976

3. Publish Validator Information¶

Please submit a Pull Request to this repo https://github.com/bnb-chain/bsc-validator-directory

This repository is a place for validator candidates to give potential delegators a brief introduction about your team and infrastructure, and present your ecosystem contributions.

4. Stop Validating¶

You can stop mining new blocks by sending commands in geth console

Connect to your validator node with geth attach ipc:path/to/geth.ipc

miner.stop()

To resume validating,

miner.start()