Funding & Bidding

Before your Validator is considered for the active set, you must fund your account with the necessary amount of tFLIP.

Getting tFLIP

Becoming a Chainflip Validator requires you to own some tFLIP and win a Validator slot in an auction cycle. The amount of tFLIP that you need to own in order to participate as a Validator is not fixed and will change on a fairly regular basis. For this reason it is recommended that you have more tFLIP than the current minimum cost of a Validator node if you want to continue adding funds through multiple epochs.

The current amount of tFLIP required to become an Active Validator can be checked on the Chainflip Auctions page. (opens in a new tab)

For the remainder of this guide, we will assume that you have an adequate amount of tFLIP, but you can proceed with the rest of the steps without tokens until you reach the funding stage.

Finally, you do not need to move the tFLIP to your Validators' Ethereum wallet. You should use your Ethereum wallet connected to Sepolia and use that to fund your account instead.

To become an active validator, you'll need to win an Auction. To win an auction, you'll need to fund your account with some tFLIP. For more information about Auctions and how they are supposed to work, you can check out this article: Chainflip Validator Auction Theory.

Adding Funds to your Validator Node

In order to fund your account, you should use the Auctions App. You could also interact with the Smart Contract directly, but since that's ugly we'll use the Dashboard for the purposes of this tutorial.

1. Make sure you have tFLIP in your Metamask.
2. Go to Chainflip Auctions page (opens in a new tab) > "My Nodes"
3. Connect your Metamask wallet with the tFLIP
4. Click the button "+ Add Node" > You should see the "Register new node" modal
5. Enter the Validator ID you got during Generating Keys step — your Public Key(SS58)— and the amount of tFLIP you want to add funds to. Click on "Add Funds"
6. Metamask will ask you to sign two transactions. The first one is a token approval and the second one transfers and add funds to your validator.
7. Congratulations! You should see the new node on "My Nodes" page
8. Once you have successfully funded your account, jump back to your terminal and run the following:

sudo systemctl restart chainflip-engine

Even after you successfully added funds, your node could still be in the Offline state. Just wait for your node to sync all the blocks.

Registering and setting up your Validator node

Before you start bidding to become an Authority node, you need to tell the network that your account will be used by a node performing the Validator role, and register the cryptographic keys that will be used for consensus.

If you don't follow all of these steps, your Validator cannot be selected to win an Auction.

First, make sure your node is fully synced! Otherwise the cli commands will likely fail.

Register your account for the Validator role by running the following command:

sudo chainflip-cli --config-root /etc/chainflip register-account-role Validator

It may take some time in order to have the account activated as Validator after running the last command.

If everything worked, you should see a transaction hash, also known as an 'extrinsic hash,' displayed on your terminal by the CLI. Congratulations! You just submitted a transaction to the Chainflip State Chain! You can go and check on it by copying the extrinsic hash and pasting it into https://scan.perseverance.chainflip.io/ (opens in a new tab).

Registration gives your account access to Validator-specific commands on the State Chain. The first of these is rotating and registering your authorship keys:

sudo chainflip-cli --config-root /etc/chainflip rotate

Now your node should be synced, your account be fully registered, your ports open, your Chainflip Engine humming along. Check the logs once more, check your node status in the web app, then crack your knuckles one more time and signal your intent to bid in the next auction:

sudo chainflip-cli --config-root /etc/chainflip validator start-bidding

Optionally, you can set a Vanity Name for your validator by running:

sudo chainflip-cli --config-root /etc/chainflip vanity-name <my-discord-username>

Once the Auction cycle is complete, the network will attempt to include your node in the next Key generation ceremony, and if successful, you'll be a real Authority! Remember you can always add more tFLIP to have a better chance at winning an Auction.