The goal of this project is to ease the process of bootstrapping an Aeternity hyperchain.
Table of Contents
There are many moving parts to operating a whole blockchain network. Hyperchains aim at being "lightweight" and "easy" to run. This is certainly true in the sense that creating one will not require a lot of (computing) resources. However, this is not necessarily the case when it comes to the amount of work and knowledge required to set up one. This project aims at automating what is possible/easy to automate and documenting the rest of the process.
The documentation (and the project) consists of two parts:
- Generating and configuring the economy of the hyperchain. This means the initial accounts with their initial balances. If you do that, you will be able to run (manually) the hyperchain on your local machine or even on a server.
- Setting up the actual environment that will allow you to run the blockchain in a semi-production environment plus all the accessory services. For this, we will be using Docker and Kubernetes. If you follow this part of the guide, you should be able to reach a point which is good enough to be what is usually called a "testnet".
- We do not aim to teach you all the concepts behind hyperchains, aeternity or blockhains in general. Please read the relevant documentation if you want to learn more about those.
- This is not a Docker/Kubernetes tutorial, although the provided instructions should be enough to get you started, some K8s experience is recommended.
- This is not a guide on how to run a production-ready, resilient and scaled up blockchain network. For this, you would need to be a DevOps/Kubernetes expert. But this guide can help you get started in this direction. And you can certainly use the provided components (like helm charts) to achieve this if you know what you are doing.
- You have a somewhat solid understanding of how blockchains work and æternity in particular.
- You are comfortable with the command line, you are a semi-competent unix administrator.
- You either have access to a working Kubernetes cluster, or you are willing to set one up yourself. We will provide short instructions on how to do that, but this is not the main focus of this guide.
- You will probably need to have a registered domain name if you want to run the network publicly.
- Hyperchain: A blockchain that is running on æternity software. It is a separate blockchain that has a different economy than the main æternity blockchains. The tokens in this network are not AE tokens, and the operator can decide how to call them.
- Hyperchain node: Or just "node" for short. This is the instance of the æternity erlang software that is running the hyperchain with special configuration. Initially we need to configure only one node to represent the whole blockchain network, but more realistically you will want to have several. Ideally many nodes (even third-party) can join your network for decentralization and resilience.
- Parent chain and Parent chain node: Can be the main æternity blockchain, Bitcoin or Dogecoin. This is the network where our hyperchain posts the so-called "commitments". This is how we secure the hyperchain. When we post commitments to the parent chain, this is proof that we can not change the history of our hyperchain retroactively.
- Commitment: A commitment is a hash of the current top block, that is posted to the parent chain.
- Validator: An account on our hyperchain that is allowed to sign blocks according to the consensus rules. This is a special account that is run by the node. Sometimes it's hard to distinguish between the node and the validator as they are often used (in speech) interchangeably. A node can operate one or several validators if it has their private keys. A node can also not run validators, and then it's a non-mining node.
- Staker or Delegator: An account on our hyperchain that stakes tokens with a validator to increase their voting power (and thus their chance of being selected to sign a block). It is expected that the validator rewards its stakers by sharing the block rewards with them.
- BRI and BRI account: Block Reward Initiative. This is a mechanism that sends a part of the rewards to the Aeternity Crypto Foundation. You can disable or configure this for your blockchain.
- Genesis block: The first block of the blockchain, containing the initial accounts and tokens (as their balances). We will be configuring this in order to bootstrap our hyperchain, and this is the main focus of part 1 of this guide.
- Faucet: An account and faucet service that is used to distribute tokens to users. This is usually done for free and is popular on testnets. Example: æternity testnet faucet.
- Staking UI: A web application that allows users to stake their tokens with validators.
- Wallet: A web application that allows users to manage their accounts and tokens, sign and send transactions to the hyperchain network (the nodes). Popular choices are Superhero and Base æpp.
- Explorer: A web application that allows users to view the blockchain state and transactions. Example: æScan
- Middleware or MDW: An indexing service that allows the wallet to retrieve past transactions and also acts as the backend to the Explorer and some wallets.