How to join Binance Smart Chain as Validator?

Before You Start

Choose Your Validator hardware

  • VPS running recent versions of Mac OS X or Linux.
  • IMPORTANT 2T GB of free disk space, solid-state drive(SSD), gp3, 8k IOPS, 250MB/S throughput, read latency <1ms
  • 12 cores of CPU and 48 gigabytes of memory (RAM)
  • Suggest m5zn.3xlarge instance type on AWS, or c2-standard-8 on Google cloud.
  • A broadband Internet connection with upload/download speeds of 10 megabyte per second

Setup a Validator Node at Testnet

Note

If you are running a node in Testnet, 2CPU/8GB of RAM is sufficient.

Install BSC Fullnode

you can download the pre-build binaries from release page or follow the instructions here to set up a full node.

Download the config files

Download genesis.json and config.toml by: 

## testnet
wget --no-check-certificate  $(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/binance-chain/bsc/releases/latest |grep browser_ |grep testnet |cut -d\" -f4)
unzip testnet.zip

Launch your node and wait for it to get synced.

Create Consensus Key

You need to create an account that represents a validator's consensus key. Use the following command to create a new account and set a password for that account:

geth account new --datadir ./node

Start Validator Node

Warning

Please do not expose your RPC endpoints to public network.

echo {your-password} > password.txt
geth --config ./config.toml --datadir ./node --syncmode snap -unlock {your-validator-address} --password password.txt  --mine  --allow-insecure-unlock --cache 18000

Get Testnet Token from Faucet

You can get testnet BNB from https://testnet.binance.org/faucet-smart, but the BNB is on Binance Smart Chain.

Download tbnbclifrom GitHub. Use tbnbcli to create an account or recover an account.

You can follow the guide to transfer BNB from BSC testnet to BC testnet.

Declare Your Candidacy

Use tbnbcli to create an account or recover an account, make sure the account get more than 10000 BNB.

Before sending create-validator transaction, make sure your bsc validator have already catched up.

Example on testnet

tbnbcli staking bsc-create-validator \
--side-cons-addr {validator address} \
--side-fee-addr {wallet address on BSC} \
--address-delegator {wallet address on BC} \
--side-chain-id chapel \
--amount 10000000000:BNB \
--commission-rate {10000000 represent 10%} \
--commission-max-rate {20000000 represent 20%} \
--commission-max-change-rate {10000000 represent 1%} \
--moniker {validator name} \
--details {validator detailed description} \
--identity {keybase identity} \
--website {website for validator} \
--from {key name} \
--chain-id Binance-Chain-Ganges \
--node=http://data-seed-pre-1-s3.binance.org:80

Go to explorer to verify your transactions.

Check your validator's status at this page

Setup a Mainnet Validator

1. Install BSC Fullnode

you can download the pre-build binaries from release page or follow the instructions here to set up a full node.

Download the config files

Download genesis.json and config.toml by:

## mainet
wget --no-check-certificate  $(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/binance-chain/bsc/releases/latest |grep browser_ |grep mainnet |cut -d\" -f4)
unzip mainnet.zip

2. Write genesis state locally

geth --datadir node init genesis.json

You could see the following output:

INFO [05-19|14:53:17.468] Allocated cache and file handles         database=/Users/huangsuyu/Downloads/bsc/node/geth/chaindata cache=16.00MiB handles=16
INFO [05-19|14:53:17.498] Writing custom genesis block
INFO [05-19|14:53:17.501] Persisted trie from memory database      nodes=21 size=56.84KiB time=357.915µs gcnodes=0 gcsize=0.00B gctime=0s livenodes=1 livesize=-574.00B
INFO [05-19|14:53:17.502] Successfully wrote genesis state         database=chaindata hash=7d79cc…fb0d1e
INFO [05-19|14:53:17.503] Allocated cache and file handles         database=/Users/huangsuyu/Downloads/bsc/node/geth/lightchaindata cache=16.00MiB handles=16
INFO [05-19|14:53:17.524] Writing custom genesis block
INFO [05-19|14:53:17.525] Persisted trie from memory database      nodes=21 size=56.84KiB time=638.396µs gcnodes=0 gcsize=0.00B gctime=0s livenodes=1 livesize=-574.00B
INFO [05-19|14:53:17.528] Successfully wrote genesis state         database=lightchaindata hash=7d79cc…fb0d1e

3. Create Consensus Key

You need to create an account that represents a validator's consensus key. Use the following command to create a new account and set a password for that account:

Warning

Please do not share access to keystore to others.

geth account new --datadir ./node

This command will return the public address and the path to your private key. BACKUP of keyfile is necessory!

If you already have an account, use the seed phrase to recover it:

geth account import --datadir ./node

Start Validator Node

Warning

Please do not expose your RPC endpoints to public network.

## generate the consensus key and input the password
geth account new --datadir ./node
echo {your-password} > password.txt
geth --config ./config.toml --datadir ./node --syncmode snap -unlock {your-validator-address} --password password.txt  --mine  --allow-insecure-unlock --cache 18000

Wait for node to sync

Your node should now be catching up with the network by replaying all the transactions from genesis and recreating the blockchain state locally. This will take a long time, so make sure you've set it up on a stable connection so you can leave while it syncs.

View the status of the network with https://bscscan.com/.

You can monitor the status from log: $HOME/node/bsc.log by default.

Congratulations! You've now successfully joined a network as a full node operator.

If you are connecting to an existing network for which you have a data backup (from a provider you trust), you can optionally load the backup into your node storage rather than syncing from scratch. Learn more here

5. Declare Candidacy

You can use bnbcli binary to sen create-validator transaction, thus you can declare your candidacy.

Use bnbcli to create an account or recover an account, make sure the account get more than 10000 BNB.

Make sure your bsc validator have already catched up.

Command for create validator on mainnet:

bnbcli staking bsc-create-validator \
-side-cons-addr {validator address} \
--side-fee-addr {wallet address on BSC} \
--address-delegator {wallet address on BC} \
--side-chain-id bsc \
--amount 10000000000:BNB \
--commission-rate {10000000 represent 10%} \
--commission-max-rate {20000000 represent 20%} \
--commission-max-change-rate {500000000 represent 5%} \
--moniker {validator name} \
--details {validator detailed description} \
--identity {keybase identity} \
--website {website for validator} \
--from {key name} \
--chain-id Binance-Chain-Tigris \
--node https://dataseed5.defibit.io:443

Make sure that the side-cons-addr is the address you unlock when start the validator node.

Read the detailed manual here to understand other parameters.

Go to explorer to verify your transactions.

After Declare Your Candidacy

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 prodile

You can submit a PullRequest to this repository to update your information: https://github.com/binance-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/binance-chain/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()