Hello world,

How is everyone doing? Considering that the move of securenodes from alpha to beta testing is just around the corner, I have been approached by a few people asking about the move to beta and mainnet, and what the process will be.

Details are not available for the open beta testing yet, however, I am going to outline here how I intend on transitioning my securenodes to mainnet beta.

Please note at time of writing (0827 hrs AEDST 18 October 2017), securenodes are still in alpha on testnet!!!

  1. First thing I will be doing is stopping my securenode tracker software using pm2 stop secnodetracker (If you configured your pm2 service using this blog post you will have the process name secnodetracker, if you didn't you may have app instead of secnodetracker).
  2. Updating the securenode tracker software (once available) usually by running: git fetch origin then git checkout master, and finally git pull.
  3. I will then update ~/.zen/zen.conf and will be changing testnet=1 to #testnet=1. Note the # in front, is will comment out that line of the configuration.
  4. I will then restart the zend daemon using zend and then I will be creating a mainnet shielded/private z-address zen-cli z_getnewaddress.
  5. While the mainnet blockchain is downloading to the securenode, I will start to move ZEN around in my wallet (swing or arizen - not sure which one I will be using) to ensure that I have 42 ZEN in each of the staking addresses that I intend on using. I will also be sending 5x 0.2 ZEN transactions to the securenode shielded/private z-address (edit: the reasoning for the 5x 0.2 zen transactions can be found in this blog post.
  6. Once the blockchain has re-synced and I have confirmed that I have the 5x 0.2 zen in my shielded/private z-address using zen-cli z_getbalance <z-address> I will re-run the securenode tracker setup node setup.js and change the stake address to one of the mainnet t-addresses in my wallet, stored somewhere else, not on the node.

I cannot stress this enough, and I will say it again DO NOT STORE YOUR STAKING ZEN ON THE SECURENODE!!! Because, should someone compromise your securenode and gain access to it they can steal your ZEN.

  1. Finally, I will run pm2 start securenodetracker and pm2 logs securenodetracker (If you configured your pm2 service using this blog post you will have the process name secnodetracker, if you didn't you may have app instead of secnodetracker) and confirm connection to the tracking server in the console, and then confirm on the tracking server website (once released) to ensure that my securenode is setup correctly.

I hope you find this as a useful reference for when the time comes and we move to mainnet beta testing.

Stay tuned for an update in the near future on when beta testing is available, and as always, if you have any questions please shoot through a message on slack or down below.

Cheers