Creating a staking validator on the Kiln Beacon Chain merge testnet

Transcript

hey everyone good morning it is uh march 11th 2022. i am super fizz from the eatstaker community and i am joined by my good friend remy roy hello everyone uh so we are both from eatstaker you can find us at reddit.comestaker or on our discord i think it's discord dot gg slash eatstaker um eastaker is a what we call a we consider a public service to help improve access to staking and we have an overall goal to support the health of the beacon chain and with that remy has written a guide for onboarding onto the kiln test net i have not um other than reading tweets i haven't

really engaged with kiln yet um so i'm really excited this is going to be my first uh exposure to kiln i've obviously played with some of the other test nets and i know it's going to be similar but i'm excited for remy to guide me through onboarding onto kiln and i hope everyone can join us one thing i do want to point out estaker intends to give out a po-app to anyone i think it's going to be anyone who um proposes a block on kiln um after the merge test next uh in all reality we're going to have to see how it unfolds to figure out like who would be eligible um but if you participate there's a high likelihood that you're going to get uh a

poep for kiln and i i believe that's very valuable i really treasure my modashipo app uh and all of my early test net poeps i bet you do too right i do yeah awesome uh so where do we start remy um so it should be fairly simple let's start with the the guide itself uh i don't know if you have the link but i'll give it uh again in the chat here it should be fairly simple like anyone with like very little knowledge of doing like just regular installing of any software should be able to do this one and since you're an expert that should be even easier for you i'm an expert in in bs

i don't know what else that qualifies me for um so uh yeah i haven't actually looked at the guy yet so i'm going to kind of scroll through it um as i go and i think that's fair to everyone else um yeah yeah oh yeah i love we did konsuki about a month ago that was yeah and this is probably going gonna be pretty similar it's gonna be very similar um and it's gonna be even easier there's like two different things that change uh mainly how to add um the network into your meta mask which is much easier now and the other thing is the deposit for adding a validator that part is like way easier because previously we had to use these um

less known tools which required some kind of script now we can just use the the regular official tools that are promoted um and there's a launchpad as well for kim now so it's much easier cool so it's going to be much closer to the real absolutely um and so okay i'm using lab2 uh i had initially set up a brand new machine to run this um and then uh what oh you suggested that i needed a desktop instead so i switched to a uh a pre-installed virtual machine um so there could be some historical stuff on

here i need to check my services real quick i have probably done some of these things on this machine already um but we'll be fine i'll just we'll roll with it and so obviously we're beginning just with updating the machine and running upgrades do you want to show your um your screen or something oh i thought that i was i'm serious i thought that i was already sharing it um let's do this my apologies all right there we go uh and so there is the url github.com remyroy easttaker uh and from there you'll be able to get to the directions and we can

make sure that url is easily accessible for people like maybe in the description of the video or it's also on i'm terrible about descriptions but i know that's where a lot of the value is so i guess your system was somewhat out of date apparently or maybe i never ran it so you know i i don't i don't really know what this box was um i opened it up and saw a lot of uh it's kind of half clean and half junk i think i may have imported some stuff into it um so i usually suggest people start with a clean install of the ubuntu um or a clean

on on either like a virtual machine or a dedicated machine but this should still work we'll see yeah and here again we would suggest ubuntu 20.04 desktop edition um that that's that makes the most sense for anyone so best practice here is going to be to reboot after a new kernel is installed but i won't be doing that for the sake of getting the tutorial done and that's totally fine all right and now we're going to install some prerequisites we talked about these things before but as i copy here the way to paste into the browser is ctrl shift v or you can right

click and paste control v is a different terminal command and there's a bunch of these commands so like it's much easier for you to just copy and paste them than just retyping them that's i i retype if i'm trying to learn like hmm how does this work but when i'm just trying to get something done down and dirty it's going to be a straight copy paste so the first command looks like it downloaded golang and this is going to install it yep and now we're going actually this is going to set the path to be able to find go and this is going to add go to the

profile for this user so anytime this user types a go command it will be found and now we're going to remove that binary we downloaded because we don't need it here anymore that's just a leftover anyone needs after that i was looking for this yesterday the rust one liner um i am feeling obsessed with one-liner installers right now perceived i love them as well there's a i always get to this should i say rocket pool or not i don't know go ahead do it i was urging rocket pool like let's do a one-line installer because when people don't have

say you're installing from a server it's so much easier to just write a one-line installer than to try to copy like this long path all right so uh we just uh installed the rose street's most recent version of rust it's extremely easy uh with this one liner installer um the only the only problem with the one liner installer is you don't always know what's going on under the hood but if it's something that you know well uh liner is easy uh and so here we uh sourced the cargo environment uh that's part of rust so that uh our system is is aware of it and now we're gonna go to the home directory all right tell me what's going on here

so we're gonna be cloning this special version of the gef um on marius personal repository uh called merge dash kiln v2 that's just the version the the um testness guys told us to use um so that's just a special version that we're making ourselves here we've had a lot of support from uh both uh marius and perry uh for getting this stuff going so i really appreciate their willingness to involve the community in these test nets yeah my hat off to these guys they're doing so much work and they're doing awesome so

yep and now we are building this guef version it should take a little while um just to wait here big picture here um kiln is is the public merge test net for the beacon chain um i'll go ahead and finish the introduction then we'll go on um and so it's going to begin first as a proof of work chain and it's going to run as a proof of work chain for about a week and alongside that is going to be this beacon chain version that is similar to what we have now on our main net beacon chain

and there's a point in the future which we expect in about seven days uh unless someone mines it with a gpu that will bring difficulty on the proof of work net uh up to this something up to a number the total terminal difficulty and at that point uh the network network will transition from proof of work to proof of stake and then we'll all be on a proof of stake uh kiln test net that's something that uh east acre intends to hold a live launch call for we're very excited about but because of the way proof of work mining works it's a little difficult to predict when it might happen so uh we'll just have to play it by ear

um i made guess i need to move the binary and we're done with um the special guest version now we're gonna be going to build and install this special lighthouse version actually lighthouse is another beacon chain client i did actually see a um a teku uh version of instructions floating around as well and so yep it's cool to try a couple different things and in this green scheme of um testnet kel is supposed to be the last major

uh test net before the merge um so hopefully this one's gonna be the last one and it's gonna confirm that everything's working right or it's gonna find new bugs that'll be eventually fixed by the different uh client teams so if you have any like uh decentralized application like any smart contract that you have uh currently running on the mainnet you should try to deploy them on kiln and see if they they still work because there was a few different changes to the structure of the merge so after the merge there's i believe there's like two fields which have changed in the

clients and so if your program or if your smart contract lies on those fields maybe you'll have to do some minor changes there so we are building lighthouse now lighthouse is one of the four or five um proof of stake clients uh and as as a node operator you'll be running both a proof-of-work client like geth or baysu and a proof-of-stake client being lighthouse prism nimbus teku and lodestar um or lodestar uh kudos if you if you run lodestar on the test and i'm i'm feeling more excited about

running load store on mainnet have you given any thought to that um i'm getting uh to do more tests with lowstar um so i wanna i wanna see how it performs i know that the the teams is running a few nodes um currently with the um jm foundation grant with their client i wish i could easily find out the different stats about their effectiveness and how they work but i'm sure it works great so my my personal uh qualifier i do make this pretty publicly known is i'm i'm most willing to support um loadstar on mainnet when they're included on the launchpad i think that's a very good standard um so

all right so uh what do we think merge in what month june june i'm with you like i say i'd rather be wrong about june than predict july and have it in august i might tweet that one there's a lot of unknowns right so like let's say let's say we run kiln for a few months and like we we find bug every weeks or something like that's that's like unlikely but it's still possible um so maybe that'll like uh delay the launch of the merge um but we'll see like this is not the first merged test net right we we had a

bunch of those this is like i believe like the seventh for the eighth one um there was some minor ones that the the guys used to test different clients and like different new approach of like communicating between those clients but like this is not the first one that has been uh running around i wonder if we can find that ethereum merge there was that that clapping vitalik picture of the merge the first time they ran it successfully um was that in i want to say it was in uh ecc i don't think i've seen that one

there is a great picture of all the developers i'm not gonna find it here uh it would be great to show everyone but it is it's just a picture of uh essentially all of the development teams so many recognizable faces watching the the first devnet test uh and when they actually switched over from proof of work to proof-of-stake uh i went it was probably two or three months ago um but a very cool thing to watch probably even older than that because i remember people talking about the merge forever

yeah um i wonder i was going to take a break and ask uh someone to share that but i think we are almost done with compiling the lighthouse but i'm trying to find the list of the different merge tests that were happening as well let me see if i can find them and so after kiln if kiln is successful the next steps will be to merge the the three long-standing test nets uh robston rinkeby and gurley and when those are complete assuming that

everything goes well uh everything will be ready for net merge i also i'm interested in seeing that prediction market i haven't looked at in a while and i can't remember where it is um the prediction market for when the merge will happen these are all things we should put i guess in the description which uh hey i'm gonna post that to e-staker but i'm gonna be i have to to exit as soon as the video is up um i'm on a long drive so if you i can modify the description and add it there my descriptions are always like did a thing [Laughter]

hey so uh devconnect is coming um yeah i'm quite excited with that um there's a lot of uh things going on with dev connect eve sticker's gonna be hosting a three-day event there we'll have a bunch of speakers a bunch of workshops we'll have a hackathon there too so working on we are working currently on some of these details um and hopefully this week or next week we'll be able to post some of these online for you guys to see how many tickets are we offering i believe we have like 300 tickets for the three days event and then i believe 50 tickets for the hackathon

cool very exciting um all right so we made lighthouse and now we need to install it globally and we're gonna go back home i always i'm not gonna check my commitment this morning was i'm gonna follow remy's direction to the letter i'm not gonna like go rogue on him because i normally i would always do like which lighthouse let's let's make sure it's where it needs to be but we know it's there uh what are we cloning now uh we're calling the merge test net definition right so we need some of these uh genesis files or config values to be able to initialize

uh get for instance so that's what we're doing here all right so this next part here is simply to create a user for running guest create directory to hold the data and assign the proper permissions oh good i'm like i'm i was just i was afraid it was already there and i'd have to do a little bit of cleanup but thankfully it would have uh shown some error values i think if it was there already but your machine seems to be clean enough

it's so funny like i i have seen stuff on this that and maybe i just copied it over i think i copied the firefox profiles over but i was like why is there five-year-old stuff on this machine so we're initializing gif with the the merge config values and so it can like actually sync on the proper shane there let's look at this 50 maximum peers no smartphone there's a bunch of these messages that are irrelevant here but yeah writing custom genesis block is part of what we need to do there very exciting okay um and now we're going to

create the service yep ooh i'm going to try this creating services if you don't do it a lot ooh it's perfect can be kind of picky i would suggest using that copy button it's very important that unit service and install are on on all on individual lines and with the line break you will know in a moment if you didn't get it right but formatting does matter and so as usual when you create a new service you have to call daemon reload and you have to start the service and check if your service is running properly come on green yes active seems to be running fine

all right and i do love um following guides you've done so great here like when they just work and you're not like that's the goal of the guide i never make it work all right so we can watch ah do you know the last time we did this you taught me cce uh and i've forgotten it since then um i'll have to revisit we can see that like we have a bunch of these import new chain segment message um that's because kef is syncing currently and so it seems like everything's working fine like you see this weird snapshot extension registration failed that's a

common message that you should probably ignore but everything else seems to be fine and obviously i tried q to exit it'll be ctrl c to exit that does not stop the service we have to say these things every time it doesn't stop the service it only um exits the the log view yeah all right um so okay look at you uh now we're going to do the same thing we did for geth for lighthouse yep and just like we did for gaff we have to create this new user this new directory to hold the data and assign the proper

permissions we should say um if you decide to mine on this network um you should not mine with a gpu you should only mine with a cpu and i'd say at this point it might be safest just not to mine to only get coins from the faucet uh does that sound fair yeah yeah i believe the marius are trying to time the time when the the network is gonna change state so like it's harder if people are mining on the network so please don't

mind and if you do just make sure you're in touch with marius and perry to to make them know what you're doing and it's permissionless but it's still a test so yeah and this is lighthouse is working uh we're going to enable lighthouse yep and it seems like from looking at the status of the service that it's running fine but we'll see with the logs there all right so we see that it actually received a new block it's sinking properly now you have this one message about syncing

f one block cache um you can ignore that it's simply telling you that your big engine client is trying to connect with the the geth node your execution client and it's it's like figuring out that gif is not in sync yet so it's just a warning there but it's fine since we're just starting running the clients and so yeah we've we've reviewed these and we are pretty set to go here um we're going to try kiln uh first thing i'll need to do let me open up a new window over here

and i'm going to install metamask real quickly yep so if you don't have metamask yet you should this is where remy hijacks my keys and uh gets me slashed oh wow okay um ubutu never actually restarts for me when it says it's going to it's always like i need to restart now and then nothing yeah i was excited to see it asked to restart and actually restart it so if you don't have meta mask yet you should install it an easy way to install it is just go to metamaster.io and then follow the instructions there but metamask is the main tool for people to access their wallet like it's not the

only one but it's a good tool so if you don't already have it you'll have to do all of these um steps there but eventually you'll end up with your first account there and here we are oh awesome now the next step would be to go to the official kiln website uh with a browser that has metamask and you've got the link in the [Music] in the guide so you can just copy and paste it i love these easy uh easy urls that's

very handy yeah and so the new way to easily add the kiln network to metamask assembly to click on this add network button up there this is a very recent change they've upped the total terminal difficulty as a result of the issues with gpu mining so i'm so sorry where where do i click to add this so it's at the top of the page there oh that's um this new body these are the things i always miss i always miss like here's the obvious thing um obviously it's an elite chain id all right so we're on kiln now i bet i can see yeah awesome and so you you should be able to see the amount of uh kiln

eater you have in your account and it should be zero when you start right there shouldn't be any killing either now the next step would be to go to the faucet and like request some some kiln eater now i have to remind everyone uh because we are giving out a poep you're going to want to well we intend to hand out a poep you want to keep these details uh close because the poep will be related to um this address that you receive kill uh kiln testnet ethon so and the way that we've done that in the past is uh thanks to

was it sam's idea and mr mojo's implementation we're sending those uh i'm gonna actually show you right now we're sending those to the beacon scan chat for that uh which is a blog scan i believe blocks and yes am i going to show that now no let's let's move forward my goal is to uh is to follow the directions all right all right now you just have to wait a little um hopefully it should be fast enough hey 32.08 and so you can also click there was like a link there view here i believe that would redirected you to the

transaction explorer but let's see what happens if we annoy the faucet you could try it again but you should also be able to see it in your metamask eventually there might just be a small delay okay i thought that it might uh just give me the link directly but you see it there right you see that you now have 32.08 eve all right and which should be enough for you to do your deposit for activating evaluator i love that they actually included the block explorer in the metamask import that's that's a nice feature yes

so you completed this ad kiln to metamask section of the guide um so you can skip most of this part there you requested founds and then maybe you want to perform a simple transaction but maybe we can also skip that one um um that would involve like you creating a new account and then transferring from one account to the other let's skip it for now we know that it works uh it is a good a good test but um let's just keep moving so the next step would be to create your validator keys and perform the deposit so maybe you should try the wagu kejen what can you tell me about wagyu so waguki jin is a sample rapper a gui wrapper on top of the official sticking deposit cli tool

um it enables you to create your validator keys and deposit file so we'll just try it and you'll see it's pretty easy this guy looks a lot like you it does right yeah uh and so i um i know that colfax remy and a bunch of the team have been working on wagyu for a long time so i'm i'm so proud um of them for completing this should i do which which installation method uh you could like click on um maybe click on release is under uh if you just scroll up a little and download from there um so since you're on linux you should download the linux version i do love app images

and before you can use the app images you'll have to make it um executable uh so chmod plus x i'm over here wondering what this uh random data is that private i don't know all right so and you can also do this something similar with the file explorer as well can you yeah if you right click and then you go into properties you'll see there's this permissions tab and then there's this execute field i'm not sure i've ever used that dialogue it's like if you're like familiar with the cli or the command

line interface in my defense i've only been using linux like 15 years and that's probably something that it's new to me so yeah all right so now we'll create some new um secret recovery phase uh first you'll have to select the kill test net and then just click on the create new secret recovery phase which is often known as the mnemonic too do you want to walk us through these um like it's very simple uh you just click next next next until you're done pretty much so so this is your secret recovery phrase you can copy it there to make it easier you should try to store that somewhere

in case you need it later i'm going to put it in notepad and lose it promptly and so this copy button works on test nets does it work on mainnet it works on mainnet too but on mainnet you'll have to retype each word um individually but like if you click next to confirm that you actually remember or stored those you just have to paste it there and then you'll have to enter a password for your key store so whatever password you choose make sure you store that password or that you remember it uh we'll need that password later on when we do the import

into the validator client let me say this before i forget all right i will still lose it but what's remaining is simply to choose a folder where the keys will be created uh let's put those maybe in your home yeah in your home directory okay and uh they're going in home fizz kiln keys and that's pretty much it

i love wag u now you're done and so what is this an alternative to what if i wasn't doing it this way how would i do it so that's an alternative to the officials taking deposits cli tool which is created which was created by the ethereum foundation i believe um that's just a gui that you can use instead of having to type all of those commands um in your terminal is there any reason to believe that wagyu is less safe or secure than the uh there's no reason to believe that it's less secure than the official tool we had an audit and we we did good there and you can actually read the audit report if you want to

great okay so uh we are still in these directions all right now we are done with creating the keys the next step would be to do the deposit so if you just scroll down a little and in the guide you'll see um that now the next step would be to do the deposit using the kiln launch pad so um i believe you oh i went too far scrolled a little too far um adding a validator set the bottom uh go to the kiln launch pad got it and follow the instructions like if you've never used the launchpad before um there's a bunch of text that you

should read and like it explains the risk of being a validator i am reading this very carefully i'm just a speed reader um like it's it's a nice tool i do want to we should mention this um client diversity is a thing that i talk about all the time uh right now we know that uh over ninety percent of op the valid i'm sorry the proof of work execution layer clients are running guests uh bay su is coming up another mine is coming up in aragon they're all well developed and you know i mentioned lodester earlier that i was ready to support lodestar when it's on the launch

pad this is the launch pad and these three clients are listed along with geth so i really do encourage people to give one of these a shot i'm hearing a lot of good buzz about basu and i know yeah a lot of people love nethermine and aragon so there's often a time when i'll when i won't kind of i'll be like ah yeah try something but i'm i'm very eager to support all four of these clients and same with consensus clients we know that prism is running 66 percent of uh consensus clients right now lighthouse is the second client i really encourage people to try nimbus and teku and they're both excellent clients like you shouldn't be scared of running

minority clients we have played with these for over a year uh and they're all fine so this is these are all information i don't really need to click them no like this is mostly like if you haven't done your setup yet and like if you want to learn more about how you can do it oh i love this we now have the wagu kijin on the launchpad too that's a nice exposure for us that is beautiful all right and i'm keeping my keys safe it's not like i did a youtube stream and included my keys in it somehow like that would be crazy

uh okay so i need to let's see if i can navigate to it yeah so now you have to select the deposit file which should be in the directory you um selected and obviously two files here do you want to tell us the difference yeah so there's this deposit file which is used with the launchpad to do your deposits so that's mainly to to to do the deposit nothing else the key store um has your validator signing keys in there and that'll be used to um to make your validator client uh work properly all right so i uploaded the deposit data i'm choosing metamask i'm connecting my wallet so at this step you you should have some like kiln test net

uh currency uh if you don't uh just go back and do the the faucet and request some some funds there this is some of the most exciting stuff um like no matter how many times i do it like i'm just i'm blindly clicking through these because i've read them and i'm comfortable with them but this is really exciting i know uh for new validators this is when you're when your heart your blood pressure's up and you're like i don't know if i'm doing it right all right this is the big one it's as simple as clicking a few buttons and one of the things it's great to try this on testnet because when you get to mainnet it does

feel stressful but if you've done it 50 times on a test net when you get to mainnet honestly it still feels just as stressful because there's money on the line but you've done it so many times that it's second nature that's funny like when i i did so many of the tests before beacon uh chain launch you know all of the literally all of the test that's the public test notes i participated in but then when it came to do it time to do it for real i just got so sweaty and nervous like what if i do it wrong absolutely and there was a survey about this and even people that were very technical and very knowledgeable were still kind of scared all right so overview we've staked 32

test net each we have one validator the current apr is 8.5 percent uh and i have not seen this i i guess i honestly just close up because i'm done i've seen that page before but it's it's a good um checklist to make sure that you have done all the good practices uh and also there's a great invite here to the eatstaker community on discord which obviously that's what remy and i do i don't spend a ton of time in the discord but i am very proud of the quality of support that that they provide that we provide that our organization provides all right um so what's next so that's pretty much it now we should go back to the guide and do the

evaluator client create a validator that's right yeah so you were um right there so maybe you should resize that window so we can see both of them there you go and again it's just that same old copy paste yeah there's a bunch of these commands that are quite similar um you have to input your password uh and once again thank you for making this so easy to follow that's the goal uh i believe you missed the second line there thank you so as usual we're creating this new

dedicated dedicated user and directory for running the validator client and so this next steps will require the path to your um key store so i believe it was home fizz and kiln keys right kill underscore key yes so you have to replace the path to keystore with that value okay easier for me to edit here than is that right yep i believe that's right

and then you'll have to re-enter the keystore password that you use when you created your keys that's the password that you entered in the wago keygen if you forget those keys by the way you can regenerate the key store don't panic um it's it's just an extra layer of security on the validating machine so the the only thing in all of this and we say this a thousand times the mnemonic is the only thing you cannot lose if you lose your key store if you lose your deposit file if you lose your keystore password no big deal regenerate them if you lose your mnemonic then it's time to go have a nice dinner with your family

and enjoy your evening as long as you have your mnemonic or your secret recovery phrase you can always recover that's the takeaway there yeah someone's going to say why should i go have a nice evening with my family because you don't have ether anymore nothing you can do about it at that point um all right i need to reload the demon and we already performed these steps for like each of the different services that we created so we're just doing them again all right and i'm always looking for active running

now we can enable it and so the way that system services work i'm sure most people know this but some people do not um this will restart when the system restarts uh and that's why we encourage doing this if you're new we encourage doing this on on a machine you can wipe easily because if it's your first time you're probably not going to know how to modify that system daemon and stop it and start it and all that and it's okay because we're just testing um it's okay if you're doing things here that are a little above your head because if you're doing it on you know a machine you can wipe it's just a learning experience it takes more time and experience to learn to control the services it's not a hard it just takes some time

so we're looking at the logs from the validator client here and we can see that you have one synced validator or one sync beacon node and one validator that's available and one total validator and it's saying that it's awaiting activation so i guess you're in the queue for your validator to be activated since we just did the deposit so there's a maximum number of validator that can join the network at once and when that maximum gets reached there's a queue and then new validators are being added to the queue but you should be able to see your validator on the uh kiln beacon beacon chain website there and so i went back

to killing the merge dot dev i followed the link to uh beacon chain explorer and then i'm gonna go get that key there are a lot of places to get the key they're not always obvious um what's the easiest way to get you can look file or the the account you use on metamask yeah going to metamask and copying this eth1 address and pasting it into beacon chain will tell you uh validators associated with that right here we made that easy and you can click there to find out that it is pending activation awesome um and

we'll wait in this queue for a few hours oh one hour for it to be processed by the beacon chain um and so in in some other cases i would just pause the video and and show you an active validator later um but i'm short for time today um but this is it like yeah as as long as this machine is running um we have confirmed that we are pending activation on the kiln chain we have um the geth execution layer running we have the lighthouse um consensus layer running we have a validator client running that is uh ready as soon as we're activated to send good information to the kiln beacon

and so that's pretty much it you are set up and good to go uh and you'll want to leave this machine running uh once you get this started until you start hearing that the kiln test that has ended if if you're fun and crazy some people like to leave them running for extended periods just for fun but really we're looking at uh probably a month to be fair it's not required but you're right your your goal here is to get a block proposal um if you get a block proposal then i am certain that that will be delivering you a poep we we don't know yet how the network is going to unfold but that

submitting a proposal is the highest standard you can meet so if you get there you know that you're golden and from what i've heard um kiln is supposed to be running even after main nets merge so it should be a long term merge test that okay don't shut down after a month then all right uh i'm gonna stop that share remy i'm so glad to have uh how long did it take i don't know we started about 10 minutes late so i think it's a 50 minute video my voice is crapping out of me today um yeah i think it took us 50 minutes that's pretty fast i think yeah it's it's worth it it's a good

learning experience too so uh let me end the recording take care everybody bye bye don't forget to join e-staker um