Greetings everyone. We have some exciting news to share with you all today! As of last Tuesday, we've officially launched the SPS Validator Network and Splinterlands has begun using the network to validate SPS transactions. We've been closely monitoring the launch and ensuring that everything is running smoothly and we are now ready to start having users bring their nodes online.
We have created a website and guides to help users bring their nodes online quickly and easily here. You can find the github here which also has instructions on how to spin up your node in the ReadMe. There's also a snapshot that was just uploaded to help everyone spinning up a node save a lot of time processing historical blocks.
If you'd like to view, monitor and vote for active nodes, you can currently do so here. Ultimately we plan to integrate these features into a new DAO website and we're also building a block explorer now. The team is currently scoping out and discussing some additional features for Validators and we'll share more about that when details are firmed up.
The SPS rewards for staking your LICENSE and running a Node to validate transactions will be going live on March 7th, 2025 at 12:00pm Eastern time, so you'll have about a week to bring your node online. These are exciting times for the SPS DAO and Splinterlands and we're glad you're here to be a part of it!
A Few Important Notes:
If you've already tried running the validator, please delete the directory you cloned it into on your computer, and go through the setup instructions again so you pull the correct version. You must also run ./run.sh destroy before starting the instructions to make sure you remove the old node from your system.
If you have already visited the management UI at https://thespsdao.github.io/SPS-Validator/ or https://localhost:8888, make sure you clear your browsers local storage so your UI is using the correct operation prefix. You can check what it is set to in the Site Settings page.
If you are just looking to run a node for LICENSE rewards, you can run your node in a mode to remove historical data (blocks and transactions) that's older than 2 weeks old. If you are using the install script, it will ask you if you want to set the variable for this mode. If you are using the Manual Setup Instructions, look for the DB_BLOCK_RETENTION variable in the .env file you create from the .env.example file.
This mode doesn't affect the operation of the validator because its historical data that isn't needed to validate new transactions. Running in this mode allows the validator to run on machines with ~100GB of disk space. If you are trying to be a top validator, you should NOT set this mode, because top validators should be providing the network with ALL historical data. This means you will need to add more disk space to your system as time goes on to account for the growing historical data.Future validator updates will be scheduled on a block number at least 2 weeks out unless there is an emergency update the requires a quicker response. If it is an update which changes the block hash, you will have to update your node at that block number. Please see the Updating an existing node documentation on the github repository here for instructions on how to update. Node operators can track upcoming scheduled releases here on the official SPS DAO HIVE account.