Bonding Nym Node

Caution

If you unbond your Nym Node that means you are leaving the mixnet and you will lose all your delegations (permanently). You can join again with the same identity key, however, you will start with no delegations.

Nym Mixnet operators are rewarded for their work every epoch (60 minutes). To prevent centralisation, Nym API is ran by distributed validators on Nyx blockchain.

You are asked to sign a transaction and bpnd your node to Nyx blockchain so that the Mixnet smart contract is able to map your nym address to your node. This allows us to create a nonce for each account and defend against replay attacks.

Before you bond your nym-node make sure you went through all the previous steps

  1. Build or download nym-node binary
  2. Configure VPS correctly
  3. Prepare Nym wallet
  4. Setup & Run the node
  5. Configure the node (Optionally setup automation, WSS, reversed proxy)

Warning

Do not bond your node to the API if the previous steps weren’t finished. Bad connectivity, closed ports, or other poor setup will result in your node getting blacklisted.

You can bond your nym-node via the Desktop wallet.

  1. Open your wallet, and head to the Bond page, then select the node type Mixnode and input your node details. Press Next.
  • To find out your nym-node details, run ./nym-node bonding-information --id <ID>
  • To get a correct host address, run echo "$(curl -4 https://ifconfig.me)"
  1. Open the box called Show advanced options and make sure all your ports are set correctly, like the values in this table:
Node typePort nameCorrect port value
MixnodeMix port1789
MixnodeVerloc port1790
MixnodeHTTP api port (picture below)8080
Gateway (entry & exit)Mix port1789
Gateway (entry & exit)Client WS API port9000
  • If you bonding nym-node --mode mixnode through Bond mixnode desktop wallet menu, change manually HTTP api port value from deprecated 8000 to 8080 - a generic nym-node HTTP port (for all modes).

  1. Enter the Amount, Operating cost and Profit margin and press Next.

  2. You will be asked to run a sign command with your nym-node - copy and paste the long signature as the value of --contract-msg and run it.

./nym-node sign --contract-msg <PAYLOAD_GENERATED_BY_THE_WALLET>
  1. Copy the resulting signature string and paste it into the wallet nodal, press Next and confirm the transaction:
# This is just an example, copy the one from your process
>>> The base58-encoded signature is:
2bbDJSmSo9r9qdamTNygY297nQTVRyQaxXURuomVcRd7EvG9oEC8uW8fvZZYnDeeC9iWyG9mAbX2K8rWEAxZBro1

Paste Signature

This image is just an example, copy-paste your own base58-encoded signature

  1. Your node will now be bonded and ready to recieve traffic, latest at the beginning of the next epoch (at most 1 hour)

If everything worked, you’ll see your node running on the either the Sandbox testnet network explorer or the mainnet network explorer, depending on which network you’re running.

Bond via the CLI (power users)

If you want to bond your Mix Node via the CLI, then check out the relevant section in the Nym CLI docs.