Becoming a validator

Any participant in the network can signal their intention to become a validator by sending a create-validator transaction, where they must fill out the following parameters:

  • Validator's PubKey: The private key associated with this Tendermint PubKey is used to sign prevotes and precommits.

  • Validator's Address: Application level address. This is the address used to identify your validator publicly. The private key associated with this address is used to delegate, unbond, claim rewards, and participate in governance.

  • Validator's name (moniker)

  • Validator's website (Optional)

  • Validator's description (Optional)

  • Initial commission rate: The commission rate on block rewards and fees charged to delegators.

  • Maximum commission: The maximum commission rate which this validator can charge. This parameter cannot be changed after create-validator is processed.

  • Commission max change rate: The maximum daily increase of the validator commission. This parameter cannot be changed after create-validator is processed.

  • Minimum self-delegation: Minimum amount of LUM tokens the validator needs to have bonded at all time. If the validator's self-delegated stake falls below this limit, their entire staking pool will unbond.

Once a validator is created, LUM holders can delegate LUM tokens to them, effectively adding stake to their pool. The total stake of an address is the combination of the LUM tokens bonded by delegators and LUM tokens self-bonded by the entity which designated themselves.

So finally, once you have installed all daemons & CLIs, you can just run a simple create-validator command.

1/ Minimum hardware requirements

  • 4 CPU ores

  • 16 GB RAM

  • 200 GB of disk space

  • 100 mbps bandwidth

2/ Configure minimum gas price

Configure the minimum gas price to minimum-gas-prices = "0.001ulum"

$ nano ~/.lumd/config/app.toml

3/ Create a validator

Important: Do not forget to verify and change the parameters in the following command:

$ lumd tx staking create-validator \
  --amount=1000000ulum \
  --pubkey=$(lumd tendermint show-validator) \
  --moniker="my super new validator" \
  --commission-rate="0.10" \
  --commission-max-rate="0.20" \
  --commission-max-change-rate="0.01" \
  --min-self-delegation="1" \
  --chain-id=lum-network-1

You can also edit a running validator using the edit-validator command:

lumd tx staking edit-validator \
   --website="https://lum.network" \
   --details="So luminous" \
   --chain-id=lum-network-1

4/ Validator logo

If you want your validator to have a logo displayed on Mintscan, you must follow the procedure detailed here: https://github.com/cosmostation/cosmostation_token_resource

5/ Join Discord

Once your validator is up and running you can join the private validator channel on Discord. This is the main communication channel with validators.

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