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Operating a Community RPC Node

This guide covers how to operate a community RPC node on Celo.

Terminology

The term "validator" appears in code and documentation due to historical reasons, but refers to community RPC providers.

To be eligible for rewards, registered and elected nodes must operate independent RPC endpoints. This guide assumes your node has been properly registered.

Running the RPC Service​

To operate the required RPC endpoint, follow the Running a node guide.

Rewards​

Claiming Rewards​

Validator rewards for RPC nodes must be claimed, which is possible anytime after allocation. Use this CLI command:

celocli epochs:send-validator-payment --from $YOUR_ADDRESS --for $VALIDATOR_ADDRESS

Where:

  • $YOUR_ADDRESS is your Celo account address sending the transaction
  • $VALIDATOR_ADDRESS is your validator's Celo account address

Note: anyone can run this command, but rewards distribute according to your validator group's commission rate.

Verifying Rewards​

Confirm successful reward distribution by checking for ValidatorEpochPaymentDistributed events on a block explorer like CeloScan.

Tracking Rewards​

For accounting purposes, you can:

  • Query Celo nodes for ValidatorEpochPaymentDistributed events.
  • Query the EpochManager contract for validatorPendingPayments to view total allocated payments.

Group Commission Settings​

Validator rewards distribution is affected by the validator group's commission rate. A commission rate of 1 means the entire reward goes to the validator group. Ensure you understand your group's commission settings to correctly anticipate reward allocations.

Check commission settings with:

celocli validatorgroup:show $CELO_GROUP_ADDRESS

Update commission settings with the celocli validatorgroup:commission command.