Validating

Becoming a validator comes with extra responsibility compared to running a non-validating full node. Your node becomes an authority for producing blocks and a signatory for the Bitcoin held in the bridge.

1. Acquiring coins and staking for voting power

First, find your address by running nomic balance (for now this must be run on the same machine as your active full node).

Ask the community for some coins in the Discord and include your address.

Once you have received coins, you can declare your node as a validator and delegate to yourself with this command:

nomic declare \
  <validator_consensus_key> \
  <amount> \
  <commission_rate> \
  <max_commission_rate> \
  <max_commission_rate_change_per_day> \
  <min_self_delegation> \
  <moniker> \
  <website> \
  <identity> \
  <details>

IMPORTANT NOTE: Carefully double-check all the fields since you will not be able to modify the commission_max or commission_max_change after declaring. If you make a mistake, you will have to declare a new validator instead.

• The validator_consensus_key field is the base64 pubkey value field found under "validator_info" in the output of http://localhost:26657/status.
• The identity field is the 64-bit hex key suffix found on your Keybase profile, used to get your profile picture in wallets and block explorers.

For example:

nomic declare \
  ohFOw5u9LGq1ZRMTYZD1Y/WrFtg7xfyBaEB4lSgfeC8= \
  100000 \
  0.042 \
  0.1 \
  0.01 \
  100000 \
  "Foo's Validator" \
  "https://foovalidator.com" \
  37AA68F6AA20B7A8 \
  "Please delegate to me!"

2. Run your Bitcoin signer

The funds in the Bitcoin bridge are held in a large multisig controlled by the Nomic validators. If you are a validator with a significant amount of voting power, it is very important that you run a signer.