Setting up a MATIC Validator in 10 minutes or less

We're happy to announce that YieldWallet.io is participating in the Counter Stake Incentivized testnet and working closely with the Matic team to help them test and solidify their Validator and Block producer software. Participating in the public testnet event, YieldWallet gets to be one of the early adopters and supporters of the Matic network, while helping our chances of being one of the top 100 active validators when the network goes LIVE.

We thought that now would be a good time to introduce Matic to our audience and also to introduce ourselves to the Matic audience. Finally, we wanted to share a short technical guide on how to set up your own Matic Validator on their testnet if you’d like to give that a shot.

What is Matic?

Most people are familiar with Ethereum and it's scalability problem. It can at best do 15 transactions per second at last count. Given their ambitious plans to be the World computer and compute platform, this is extremely negligible for the more ambitious use cases beyond ERC20 tokens for Fundraising and NFTs (non fungible tokens).

Enter Matic: An ethereum sidechain solution that uses offchain computation to achieve scale while ensuring asset security with the Plasma network. Matic is what one would call a layer 2 solution in that it attempts to solve Ethereum's scaling problems outside the base protocol layer. A decentralized network of validators would participate in Proof-of-stake consensus to secure the network.

A more technical writeup by the team can be found here

On a non-technical sidenote, in addition to the world class engineering team that Matic has assembled to build their network (they are far ahead of most Plasma based networks and competition at this point in terms of rolling out real world usable software), Matic has captured our imaginations being one of the first high-quality blockchain protocol projects out of India and also one of the first to raise money successfully on the Binance IEO Launchpad.

Matic Validator setup

We’ve put together a 3 video series on setting up a Matic validator on their Counter Stake incentivized testnet. Do head on over to the Matic discord forums if you're interested in participating and follow along with the easy steps as you'll see in the videos.

Hardware: t3a.large instance on AWS. 2 vCPUs. 8 GB Ram. Network 5 GBPS.

These instances have AMD EPYC 7000 series processors @2.5 Ghz.

OS: Ubuntu 18.04 AMI (standard from Amazon)

Part I: Setting up Heimdall (the Validator layer)

It will take several hours for Heimdall to be fully sync'd. Once it is done you can proceed to Part II. Run 'curl http://localhost:26657/status' periodically to check the status of sync and proceed when catching_up: false

Part II: Setting up Bor (the Block producer layer)

Part III: Stake to become a validator. Please ensure your metamask is set to the right account on the Goerli testnet before starting the process.

Note: In Part III the long pauses are us waiting for transactions confirmations on metamask. The transaction confirmation windows do not show up on the video, but you just have to hit 'approve' or 'sign' as new dialogs show up (total of 3 times) until you have completed the Validator registration.

If you prefer here are a couple of links that provide a written walk through of the validator setup:

https://docs.matic.network/staking/linux-package-installation/
https://docs.matic.network/staking/stake-on-matic/

What is YieldWallet.io?

YieldWallet is a staking-as-a-service platform based out of India. Our goal is to help holders of various PoS (Proof-of-stake) and dPos (delegate Proof-of-stake) tokens participate to secure or power their networks and earn a yield on their tokens, regardless of their level of technical sophistication and investment level.
We run a service that is highly reliable, available and secure. We also are committed to only supporting those coins or tokens whose project and team we believe in. Matic is one of those few high-quality projects in the space that we would like to support.

Why delegate your Matic tokens to Yieldwallet.io?

When the Matic mainnet goes live, Matic holders will have the option of selecting from many validators. Here's why you should consider supporting YieldWallet.io as a Matic holder:

a. Our performance running services for Livepeer, Tezos and Decred can be seen at their respective links. We have established a track record in the staking space. While we aren't the largest validator service, we're certain in the top in terms of availability and uptime.

b. We plan to put out more educational material similar to the validator setup videos in this post. This will be aimed at all technical levels.

c. We’re building a Cryptocurrency Exchange that will not only feature Matic trading pairs against other Major Cryptocurrencies, but also MATIC/INR (Indian rupee) pairs.

d. We offer 24 / 7 customer support and are always available to answer any questions you have or help you with the staking process.

We hope you enjoyed this post. Do let us know in the comment if you'd like to see other topics (technical or non-technical covered). Thank you and stay safe!

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