❓FAQ & Resources

General Validator FAQ

dYdX Foundation Validators FAQs & Resources - All Your Questions Answered

Managed by dYdX Foundation

Validator Network FAQ

What are the hardware requirements for running a validator?

Hardware Requirements

Is there a minimum number of delegated tokens to activate a validator node?

There is no minimum. The active validators are the top 60 validators with the highest total stake (where total stake = self-bonded stake + delegators stake).

Please provide a detailed node-building document and give the recommended operational configuration.

Refer to this document on how to set up a full node.

Please provide documentation on public & private keys generation, addresses generation, validation method of address legality and activation address.

Instructions available on this page in the section Preparing DYDX for self-delegation

How to set the avatar of the validator node on Mintscan?

Make a PR with your logo as validatoraddress.png https://github.com/cosmostation/chainlist/tree/main/chain/dydx/moniker

Please elaborate on --non-validating-full-node as it disables the pricing daemon and enables the full-node ProcessProposal logic. Validators should never use this mode? Do we have any chain security side effects with this flag?

A non-validating full node will not participate in proposing blocks but still validates the chain data.

1) The flag just sets an empty Prepare/PrepareProposal for the application. All nodes run ProcessProposal, 2) full nodes do not participate in voting.

How to sync the data to the current block height?

See example instructions of using a snapshot, including backing up and recovering priv_validator_state.json

Extended Validator FAQ

Can validators use a snapshot to sync?

• Validators can use snapshot

Do validators communicate through a public P2P network, or is there an internal network?

• It's a public P2P network

If we run a validator without staking enough DYDX, will the validator works in same way as full node, or there will be some subtle differences?

• It's not a validator if it is not in the active set (max 60), It should work like a full node in that case

How many validators are currently running?

• The active validator set is limited to 60.

Who is running the set of 60 validators?

• You can see the list of mainnet validators at https://www.mintscan.io/visualization/validators. Most if not all validators are professional firms that are in the business of staking/validating, and not trading.

Can you provide the locations of the top 5 validators?

• An up-to-date list can be found here: https://observatory-staging-g4ywd.ondigitalocean.app/dydx/countries

Do you have a way of finding out the peer to peer IPs of various validators? Especially Santorini and Ex Machina?

• You would have to reach out to them specifically for this.

Do you have some faster validators that we can send orders to?

• Validators usually don't expose the RPC endpoints for orders to be submitted to, and we also don't have a list of validator IPs.

Have you discovered some MEV activities and slashed the validators? Where can we see the record? We can see the MEV for price discrepancy on https://dydx.skip.money/, what about the cancellation behavior?

• There is a subtle bug with the price discrepancy calculation driving all of the detected discrepancy so far. We're working to get it fixed and we'll redeploy soon. No authentic MEV has been detected so far.

If certainty is not possible, would deliberately taking already-canceled orders be considered an attack against makers? How can such attacks be mitigated?

• Nodes should respect cancels as soon as they receive them, if they don't then we see that as MEV and have a dashboard / metrics tracking MEV where we can identify nodes that are not respecting cancels and use social slashing to either remove them from the active set or have them correct any configurations that led to not respecting the cancels.

Are dydx v4 transaction fees being distributed income to validators? How often do you distribute income? From your side, what will be the expected return for dydx staking?

Yes they are being distributed right now. And they are being distributed each block to the block proposer. The expected return depends on both fees and dYdX staked, so it's difficult to give a proper answer. More fees/lower staked = higher return, low fees/more staked = lower return.

• You can see the current staking APY here: https://www.mintscan.io/dydx

• You can read more about fees here: https://dydx.exchange/blog/v4-rewards-and-parameters

Can we use locked DYDX to stake in the validators?

• Yes you can use locked DYDX to stake to validators

Can we broadcast transactions via Validator's Rest endpoint?

• It only works with the gRPC endpoint

What is the difference between port 9090 and 26657? which port should be used?

• Port 9090 is the gRPC port and 26657 is for validator, unless you run a validator or full node you don't use 26657