Run Baklava Testnet Validator
How to get a Validator node running on the Celo Baklava Testnet (Celo's Node Operator Testnet).
As of block height 31,056,500 (March 26, 2025, 3:00 AM UTC), Celo is no longer a standalone Layer 1 blockchain—it is now an Ethereum Layer 2! Some documentation may be outdated as updates are in progress. If you encounter issues, please file a bug report.
For the most up-to-date information, refer to our Celo L2 documentation.
Why run a Baklava Testnet Validator?
The Baklava testnet is the best place to get started running a validator, or test out new validator configurations before deploying to Mainnet.
If you would like to keep up-to-date with all the news happening in the Celo community, including validation, node operation and governance, please sign up to our Celo Signal mailing list here.
You can add the Celo Signal public calendar as well which has relevant dates.
If you are transitioning from the Baklava network prior to the June 24, 2021 reset, you will need to start with a fresh chain database. You can create new nodes from fresh machines, as described in this guide, or you may delete your chaindata folder, which is named celo in the node data directory, and start over by running the provided init commands for each node described below. All on-chain registration steps, the commands completed with celocli, will need to be run on the new network.
Key differences are:
- New network ID is
62320 - A new image has been pushed to
us.gcr.io/celo-org/geth:baklava - A new genesis block, bootnode enode, and the new network ID are included in the Docker image