***Cere Network’s decentralized data technology ensures every transaction on the blockchain, no matter the volume and frequency, is secure. Validators secure the network.***
Running a validator node empowers Validator’s and their nominators to actively secure the network, earn rewards, and shape its decentralized future.
This guide covers the steps required to become a Validator on Testnet. Check in-line notes for Mainnet hints.
Running a validator on a live network is a lot of responsibility! You will be accountable for not only your own stake, but also the stake of your current nominators. If you make a mistake and get slashed, your tokens and your reputation will be at risk. However, running a validator can also be very rewarding, knowing that you contribute to the security of a decentralized network while growing your stash.
It is highly recommended that you have significant system administration experience before attempting to run your own validator. You must be able to handle technical issues and anomalies with your node which you must be able to tackle yourself. Being a validator involves more than just executing some binaries and a few Github commands.
To be elected into the set, you need a minimum stake behind your validator that is higher than the ‘lowest’ stake from the existing Active set. This amount can be estimated based on the staking targets shown in Cere Explorer. This stake can come from yourself or from nominators. This means that as a minimum, you will need enough CERE to set up stash and staking proxy accounts with the existential deposit, plus a little extra for transaction fees. The rest can come from nominators. Validators are elected using the nPoS Elections algorithm.
We recommend to run validator’s on a cloud server running Linux. You may choose whatever VPS provider that your prefer. For this guide we will be using Ubuntu 22.04, but the instructions should be similar for other platforms.
To verify your validator set up, it is possible to run it against a Cere Testnet. However, validator slots are intentionally limited to ensure the stability. As such it is advised for node operators wishing to run Testnet validators join the Contributor Discord server and talk with the other validators there about capacity and availability.
You can obtain CERE Testnet tokens in the Cere Faucet.
Here is a small comparison of each network characteristics as relevant to validators:
| Network | Cere | Testnet #1 |
|---|---|---|
| epoch | 4h | 1h |
| era | 1d | 6h |
| token | CERE | CERE |
| active validators | ~65 | ~10 |
Check this awesome guide on the Polkadot Wiki for setting set up Prometheus with Grafana to monitor your node on Linux.