Getting Started
When the $HIT Heads decided to team up with our friends at FOMO to launch the 💚ADDIX+FOMO🐸 Validator, we had zero knowledge of how to do it. We knew that we could potentially leverage the tokenomics ala Hug, WOWO & Edge, to benefit our holders, but had zero knowledge of how this would work in practice.
We were contacted by professional node runners, who quoted a few hundred dollars to run the node for us. After a quick discussion with Don Marco, we decided that based on a couple of different factors (avoiding centralisation of node runners & not undermining the tokenomics of the entire endeavor!) we would run it ourselves. It would also be more fun to actually learn! Alright sweet - erm, how do we run node?
You and me both Fry
Enter the community
This is possibly the greatest asset Radix has, along with our various subgroups. The Node Runner community is superb, and within a couple of weeks, Haseeb was up and (literally) running our Node. I had the vantage point from outside of the dev world looking in. There was a rather nice cascade at work. The more experienced devs troubleshoot with the juniors, who then assist the beginners. Information and tricks flow down from those Scyrpto OGs. It was genuinely beautiful to see in action!
100% Uptime and patting ourselves on the back, we were delighted! Right then, how to claim fees? At first I simply assumed, "well, it must just arrive in a tx! You know, from one of the various Radix entitties; works or Jersey or Adam. It was only when it didn't magically arrive, and speaking to Ward, that we realised this is a tx that we have to trigger ourselves, in Radix Console.
A regular user may not ever interact with console, but this is where the brainy lot play. I am not one of this lot. So when it dawned on me I would need to input the following on a regular basis, changing out the things in capital for the node specific details, including the ever-changing amount to be unstaked, I was not looking forward to it.
Yes, everything is on a ledger and No, I haven't stored the seed phrase digitally. However somewhere in my mind resides an 80 year old technophobe, who is convinced that a wrong tx will be catastophic, and that the internet resides in a box.
Suffice to say while I have sent the occasional raw transaction (and possibly initiated myself as Dev 12,001 in the process?) I would rather avoid it!
The steps of the process are as follows:
- Unlock Earned LSUs with a Raw Tx as above
- After a certain epoch (roughly four weeks) they can be claimed
- Claim LSUs with a Raw Tx similar to above
- Wait for a certain epoch (roughly one week) to claim
- Claim LSUs as XRD, similar to how us normies unstake from a validator in Dashboard
I think I'd rather stick to my nice and simplified wallet transaction preview thank you very much.
Enter Haseeb & His Weekend Project
What Haseeb did was brilliant, and here is why. He built an interface, housed on one page, that the owner can do everything from. He built this initially for us (me) to manage the node, but because he is an absolute sweetie, decided to make it open for everyone to use. Here is a tour:
Find the Node I am interested in & enter
1) Unlock the LSUs from the dropdown menu
Needless to say, entering in too high a value will grey out the box.
2) Check the status of LSUs already being unlocked
Now this is super cool. Remember the picture above with the epoch stating the unlocking date? Yep, not exactly human-readble. So Haseeb build a Radix-Epoch-to-real-life-date-and-time Converter, which shows how far along in that four week period we are! Pretty damn awesome!!
3) When the Epoch is reached, simply claim LSUs
4) When the second LSU unstake is reached, simply claim
5 & 6) Track the second LSU unstake & Claim your XRD!
This part is similar to an unstake in Dashboard.
And there you have it!
What's so cool, is as Haseeb was building this out, he was tagging more and more features to it. So non-Node Runners can manage their stakes from this interface too.
Additionally, instead of just having functionality for the 💚ADDIX+FOMO🐸 Validator, any Node Runner could use their Owner Badge and manage their Validator from our interface, completely free of charge! It was Haseeb's way of saying thank you to the community who have been so helpful!
This also provides some nice visibility to what other node runners within the set are doing, LSUs being unlocked, and $XRD leaving their node..
And finally, fee alert change
On 17th of November, it was flagged by the community that a team running a Node in the top 50, with over 25m XRD staked to it, stopped responding to messages, deleted their website, and had a fee that was now 100%...
Later that very day, Haseeb started working on a way to highlight fee changes.
And within two days it was live!
In Summary
The power of Scrypto in the hands of a talented dev means that a cheeky weekend task can accomplish very impressive feats!
And yes, Haseeb is fucking awesome! It was such a thoughtful thing to do, then to open it out to the Node Running community free of charge was classy. Also finding utility and tools for the wider Radix Ecosystem Rocks! It was also a really skilled thing to do too - to tidily bring a fragented process together in one screen.
It was also a bit of a watershed moment for us (the Royal us, crowbarring myself in here!). To start from zero knowledge of node running, to then adding elegant utility, really is a lovely moment.
The tipping wallet on this has been changed to Haseeb's account. Get him a coffee, he deserves it!
& if you like what we're doing and want to support, please consider staking $XRD to the 💚ADDIX+FOMO🐸 Validator
