Join the XRPL 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.

XRPL 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:

  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:

   exrpd config chain-id exrp_1440002-1
   

2. Create or add a key to your node. For this tutorial, we use the test keyring:

   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:

   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.

   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:

   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:

   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:

   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:

   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.

To begin the process, join the XRPL EVM Sidechain Discord and select your validator role in the #roles channel. After that, you will need to introduce yourself in the #become-a-validator channel. Explain who you are and why you want to run a validator. Generally, you will be accepted if you have a real interest in the project, either because you want to use the network for a company, are a recognized member of the community who wants to contribute to its long-term governance, or just have an academic interest.

While doing your introduction, you will need to provide the details that identify your validator.

• Moniker: The public name of your validator
• Validator operator address: The address of the operator of the node that starts with ethmvaloper. Can be obtained by running:

exrpd keys show <key_name> --keyring <keying_backend> --bech val

• Public key: The public key of your node. Can be obtained by running:

exrpd tendermint show-validator

After that, a proposal to accept your validator will be voted on over a period of 7 days. During this time, some members may write to you publicly or privately to ask more questions. You can view the process on the XRPL EVM Sidechain Explorer.