BPX space farmers are constantly validating all transactions and creating new blocks, thereby securing the entire blockchain. But apart from the farming, there are at least a few other ways you can support the BPX network. In today’s article, we will explain some of them.
Allow incoming connections to your full node
This is the simplest thing you can do to support BPX Chain. It doesn’t cost you anything and helps both your node and other users stay in sync with the network.
If you’re already running your own BPX full node, please check whether both your clients (BC and EC) are accepting external connections. Unfortunately, our observations show that a significant number of nodes are located behind the NAT and only establish outgoing connections to other peers, but do not accept incoming connections.
Even if you are pretty sure that you have forwarded the BPX ports on your router, keep in mind that the ports used by BPX V2 were completely different, and BPX V3 has a separate ports for both the Beacon Client and the Execution Client. It’s really worth spending a few minutes to check whether your configuration is up to date.
Ports that should be forwarded for the current version of BPX:
| Beacon Client | 6201 | TCP |
| Execution Client | 30303 | TCP + UDP |
Run your own timelord
The BPX consensus algorithm requires at least one special node called the Timelord to run all the time. The timelord continuously performs Proof of Time calculations and propagates its result to all nodes accross the network. If there were no active timelords on the network, the blockchain would stop producing new blocks until at least one timelord is back online.
BPX developers maintain two official timelords with redundant internet connections. The probability that both of them will fail at the same time is small, but still not zero. Therefore, it is very important to have many community managed timelords, scattered across different geographic locations.
If you are running your BPX full node on Linux OS, you can support the network by running your own timelord. Unfortunately, other operating systems are not supported at the moment. Keeping a timelord running doesn’t cause you any disadvantages other than high usage of 3 CPU threads. The current budget CPUs usually have 8 threads, and the high-end ones can have even 128 threads, so running the BPX timelord shouldn’t noticeably slow down your machine, especially if it is high-end workstation.
If you want to support BPX Chain by running your own timelord, here you can find full instructions how to set it up.
Run your own bluebox timelord
Proofs of time generated by regular timelords described above are usually not perfect. They can be done in more compact way, but it takes much more time than the typical interval between two following beacon chain blocks, and the consensus requires the proof to be available at that time. That’s why bluebox timelords exists. They perform calculations on old blocks to compact proofs of time contained in these blocks. When the given block is compressed, its new version is propagated accross the network and all nodes replace it in their database.
Currently there is no Bluebox timelord in the BPX network and no blocks are compacted yet. Its presence is not required in any way, but each compacted block speeds up the initial synchronization for users just joining the network. In the most optimistic case, there should be so many bluebox timelords in the network that blocks are compacted faster than they are created, and thus the entire blockchain should always be fully compacted.
Just like a regular timelord, bluebox timelord can be runned only on Linux nodes. Bluebox timelord can be configured how many CPU threads it can use. The minimum is just one, but if you assign more cores, it will be compressing the chain faster.
To run your own bluebox timelord, follow the instructions in this guide.
Run your own RPC server
The Web3 RPC API is a way for wallets, blockchain applications and developers to communicate with the BPX full node and interact with the BPX Chain. It allows them to perform various actions such as sending transactions, querying the account balance or transactions history, and interacting with smart contracts.
Each BPX execution client provides a private RPC server that can only be accessed by applications running on the same machine (localhost). RPC servers can also be made publicly available to anyone on the Internet, like the official one: https://rpc.mainnet.bpxchain.cc. Thanks to these public RPC servers maintained by volunteers, you can use the Metamask wallet on your smartphone or laptop and transact on BPX chain, even though your mobile device is not running a full node software. You simply use someone else’s synchronized full node to instantly interact with a blockchain.
A decentralized blockchain should not rely solely on developer-hosted RPC servers. It is crucial that users have a choice of many different endpoints managed by community members spread all over the world.
In this guide you will learn how to configure your own RPC server for BPX Chain and if you decided to run one, let us know about it in the comment.
That’s it for today, but that doesn’t mean there are no other ways to contribute to BPX Chain development. In the next article, we will present further possibilities, especially taking into account our two new products: Synapse network and BPX Bridge.