Join the XRP Ledger EVM Sidechain Devnet

This tutorial walks you through the steps to join the existing XRP Ledger EVM Sidechain Devnet.

For ease of use, create an alias, exprd, to run all commands inside your Docker container.

EVM Sidechain Node Hardware Requirements

• Linux/AMD64 operating system.
• 4 or more physical CPU cores.
• At least 500GB of NVME SSD disk storage.
• At least 32GB of RAM.
• At least 100Mbps network bandwidth.

Pre-requisites

Before proceeding to initialize the node, ensure that the following pre-requisites are installed and running:

• Docker 19+
• Create an alias to run all commands in this tutorial inside a Docker container:
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  alias exrpd="docker run -it --rm -v ~/.exrpd:/root/.exrpd --entrypoint=\"\" peersyst/xrp-evm-blockchain:latest exrpd"

Initialize Node

The first task is to initialize the node, which creates the necessary validator and node configuration files.

1. Initialize the chain parameters using the following command:
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   exrpd config chain-id exrp_1440002-1

2. Create or add a key to your node. For this tutorial, we use the test keyring:
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   exrpd keys add <key_name> --keyring-backend test

   Note the key_name you enter as you need to reference it in subsequent steps.

   Note For more information on a more secure setup for your validator, refer to cosmos-sdk keys and keyrings and validator security.

3. Initialize the node using the following command:
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   exrpd init <your_custom_moniker> --chain-id exrp_1440002-1

   Monikers can contain only ASCII characters. Using Unicode characters renders your node unreachable.

All these commands create your ~/.exrpd (i.e $HOME) directory with subfolders config/ and data/. In the config directory, the most important files for configuration are app.toml and config.toml.

Genesis & Seeds

1. Copy the Genesis File.

   Download the genesis.json file from here and copy it to the config directory: ~/.exrpd/config/genesis.json. This is a genesis file with the chain-id and genesis accounts balances.

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   wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Peersyst/xrp-evm-archive/main/poa-devnet/genesis.json -O ~/.exrpd/config/genesis.json

   Attention

   Before jumping to the next item, make sure that the contents of the file ~/.exrpd/config/genesis.json match the contents of the file genesis.json.

   Verify the genesis configuration file:

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   exrpd validate-genesis

2. Add Persistent Peer Nodes

   Set the persistent_peers field in ~/.exrpd/config/config.toml to specify peers with which your node maintains persistent connections. You can retrieve them from the list of available peers on the archive repo (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Peersyst/xrp-evm-archive/main/poa-devnet/peers.txt).

   To get a list of entries from the peers.txt file in the PEERS variable, run the following command:

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   PEERS=`curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Peersyst/xrp-evm-archive/main/poa-devnet/peers.txt | sort -R | head -n 10 | awk '{print $1}' | paste -s -d, -`

   Use sed to include them in the configuration. You can also add them manually:

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   sed -i.bak -e "s/^persistent_peers *=.*/persistent_peers = \"$PEERS\"/" ~/.exrpd/config/config.toml

   At this point you should have the list of the peers copied to the persistent_peers field in the config.toml file. You can verify this by running the following command:

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   cat ~/.exrpd/config/config.toml | grep persistent_peers

Start a Node

You can start a node container with the following command:

exrpd start

If you would like to run it in Docker's deamon mode, you can use the following command:

docker run -d --name=node --entrypoint="" --restart=always -v ~/.exrpd:/root/.exrpd peersyst/xrp-evm-blockchain:latest exrpd start

With this docker command, you will be creating a container with the image peersyst/xrp-evm-blockchain:latest that will run in background (-d flag) which will be named node (--name=node) that will be restarted in the case it stops (--restart=always flag) and that will have the folder ~/.exrpd mounted in the directory /root/.exrpd inside the container.

This command starts the node and begins syncing with the network. You can monitor the progress by watching the logs of the running container

docker logs -f <container_id>

Join the Proof of Authority with your node

Similar to the XRPL mainnet, the Devnet runs in a Proof of Authority consensus mechanism. In order to start signing for new blocks and participate in the network consensus, the current validators need to accept your node as a new trusted validator. This democratic process, requires the approval of the majority of the current validators.

If you would like to be part of the Proof of Authority, you should join the EVM Sidechain Discord channel and submit your request to the #become-a-validator channel.

Bond the authority points to your validator

Warning: Before creating a Devnet validator node, ensure that:

• The current validators have accepted your node as a new trusted validator through an on-chain governance proposal.
• You're running the node container and your node is fully synced with the network.

Create a Devnet validator node with this command:

exrpd tx staking create-validator \
  --amount=1000000apoa \
  --pubkey=$(exrpd tendermint show-validator) \
  --moniker=<public_name_of_your_node> \
  --chain-id="exrp_1440002-1" \
  --commission-rate="0.00" \
  --commission-max-rate="0.00" \
  --commission-max-change-rate="0.00" \
  --min-self-delegation="1000000" \
  --gas="300000" \
  --gas-prices="7axrp" \
  --keyring-backend=<your_keyring> \
  --from=<your_key>