This article will guide you through running ETH2.0 Beacon Node with Lighthouse client on MacOS if you have barely to 0 experiences with Terminal command lines and you want to spin off Lighthouse Beacon node and join the validator pool on ETH2.0 Beacon chain with Lighthouse client. This guide includes spinning off Nethermind Goerli node.
The goal of this article is to guide you through becoming a validator without the need to reach out to teams so you can post “This is exciting” kinda tweet when you manage to spin off your Beacon node (make sure to tag me if you use this guide). This guide can’t be used to run other clients as there may be differences when running different ETH1 clients to run Goerli node and other ETH2.0 clients to run Beacon node.
Note: You may experience running into a bugs. Don’t worry about bugs, make sure to report them to teams if you experience some :) If you will get stuck, reach out to the teams- they’re happy to assist you.
Intro
Ethereum has recently celebrated it’s 5th Birthday (July 30th) since genesis block of ETH1 chain was mined. Today, August 4th 1pm UTC ETH2.0 Medalla testnet will go live. This is super exciting moment for Ethereum community as the road to ETH2.0 is going public will start processing attestations and blocks on Proof-Of-Stake mechanism. This is the beginning of the slot zero of epoch zero. Important note — Medalla is just Testnet, which means that you’re going to use Goerli testnet gETH to stake and join Medalla Validator pool. Not a real mainnet ETH.
If you’re interested to dive more into ETH2.0 I highly recommend you to check out The State of ETH2, June 2020 by Danny Ryan
TL:DR of what we are going through in this guide
- Install Developer Libraries
- Spin off ETH1 Goerli node
- Make deposit via Launchpad
- Pick ETH2.0 client
- Install Lighthouse Developer Libraries
- Run Lighthouse Beacon Node
- Run Lighthouse Validator Client
- Additional Reading
Install Developers libraries📚⌨️
This is just a basic installation of what we need in order to spin off ETH1 Goerli node and make deposit on ETH2.0 chain via Launchpad. We will do some installation later, as every ETH2.0 client have different requirements on what needs to be installed in order to run their client.
You will need to install a few developer libraries at first. In order to have no struggles, neither “red lines” — errors in Terminal window, you should head over to “Security & Privacy” window on your Mac and select “Open Anyway” as you may experience that some apps are not notarised by Apple, which may cause you some headache moments. Use this guide for a better explanation with screenshots. You will need this step to enable Nethermind runner — we will go through this step later. You may need this step to enable Homebrew or other libraries, programming languages.
Homebrew — This is the magic that will help you install and run other programs on your MacOS. This is the basic you need in order to be able to run next programs and help you with installation process. Copy paste this into your Terminal:
brew install gmp && brew install snappy && brew install lz4
OpenSSL — this is general-purpose cryptographic library that Lighthouse, and I believe other ETH2.0 clients are using. Copy paste into Terminal:
brew install openssl
I hope that you made it through this important step, it will be just simpler 🙂
Goerli Node
Goerli node is well supported across all ETH 1.0 clients, tooling, and infrastructure, and is used to test the ETH 2.0 transition through a deposit contract deployed to Goerli. You need to run Goerli testnet in order to make deposit contract that you upload as “deposit data” to launchpad that will allow you to stake on ETH2.0 Beacon chain. You have more options to pick which client to spin off in order to run Goerli node — the most used is Geth, lighter one is Nethermind.
Note: Geth may be easier to spin off, Nethermind is lighter.You may experience some bugs which are not something that you can’t deal with. I found a great guide on how to spin off Lighthouse with Geth node. There’s another guide on how to spin off Goerli Geth node.
Request gETH — Goerli ETH
You will need gETH or Goerli ETH in order to stake on ETH2.0 Beacon node. There are multiple ways how to request for gETH:
- Go to Goerli Authenticated Faucet and enter your ETH address
- Go to Prysmatic Labs Discord that can give you 165 gETH every 6 hours
- Or ask on Lighthouse Discord for gETH
#ethereum #eth2.0 #non-tech-guide #goerli-node #beacon-node-eth-2.0-lighthouse #node
