How to stake on NYM Validator 🐳🐳🐳

As said in the article about mixnodes and validators, NYM is a technology aiming for providing privacy for the communications.

Once you get some tokens, PUNK at this time, you can use the web wallet to check the balance of your account and delegate it to mixnodes or gateways… but, using the binaries, you can additionally delegate to validators.

For doing this, we first need the nymd binary on our system to follow the procedure for compiling it from the documentation for validators, but skip the remaining parts https://nymtech.net/docs/run-nym-nodes/validators/.

Specifically, the binaries we’re interested in are:

• libwasmvm.so
• nymd

Restoring the wallet

When you created your wallet at https://testnet-milhon-wallet.nymtech.net/ you got a mnemonic phrase that can be used to access it or to restore… we need that one (still keep it private and do not share with anyone).

So… first things first, we need to restore the wallet with:

nymd --keyring-backend=os keys add youruser --recover

Just make sure to use the proper keyring-backend like os or file to store the key and decide the name youruser for holding and referring to it with later commands.

Once the key is created (restored), it will output the punkADDRESS we need to use later on.

Set the variables we’re going to use:

    OPERADDRESS=punkvaloper1875deee8zecl6smhl2zg42ulpgsjn80cj8vq3x
    WALLET=$YOURpunkADDRESS # address from above step
    BACKEND=file # the backend you use for your keyring
    FROM=$YOURACCOUNT # the name of the account  you restored in previous step (youruser in the example above)

Staking against a validator

We need to know the address of the validator, so we just need to go to the explorer https://testnet-milhon-blocks.nymtech.net/validators decide which one we want to stake on, and in the details page of it, get the address, for example: punkvaloper1xq1kABCDEqumupju86ljzlj6q2lqhdz2ne76gv and let’s store it as a variable as VALIDATOR.

To stake, we need to also know our current balance, but as we are not running nymd but using it as client, we need to specify a validator with the 26657 port open:

nymd query bank balances ${WALLET}  --node "tcp://testnet-milhon-validator1.nymtech.net:26657"

Once we know the balance, we should get a value expressed in upunk and we should consider the commission for the network fees (5000upunk) and store as a number in a variable BALANCE.

Let’s stake with this command:

nymd tx staking delegate --node "tcp://testnet-milhon-validator1.nymtech.net:26657" -y ${VALIDATOR}  ${BALANCE}  --from ${youruser}   --keyring-backend=${BACKEND}   --chain-id "testnet-milhon"   --gas="auto"   --gas-adjustment=1.15   --fees 5000upunk

This will add the delegation and will start appearing on the explorer for the chosen validator.

Claiming rewards

After we staked for a while, we might be able to claim the rewards, note that this still requires ‘gas’ in the form of upunk.

First let’s check again our balance with:

nymd query bank balances ${WALLET}  --node "tcp://testnet-milhon-validator1.nymtech.net:26657"

Let’s claim the rewards:

~/.nymd/nymd  --node "tcp://testnet-milhon-validator1.nymtech.net:26657"  tx distribution withdraw-rewards -y ${VALIDATOR} --from ${youruser} --keyring-backend=${BACKEND} --chain-id='testnet-milhon' --gas='auto' --gas-adjustment=1.15  --fees 5000upunk

And let’s check again the balance with

nymd query bank balances punkADDRESS  --node "tcp://testnet-milhon-validator1.nymtech.net:26657"

If everything went fine, and we got the tokens there for a while, we should see a growing number of tokens back, that… can be delegated again.

Enjoy! (and if you do, you can Buy Me a Coffee )