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Setting up a Celestia bridge node

This tutorial will go over the steps to setting up your Celestia bridge node.

Bridge nodes connect the data availability layer and the consensus layer.

Validators do not have to run bridge nodes, but are encouraged to in order to relay blocks to the data availability network.

Overview of bridge nodes​

A Celestia bridge node has the following properties:

  1. Import and process “raw” headers & blocks from a trusted Core process (meaning a trusted RPC connection to a celestia-core node) in the Consensus network. Bridge Nodes can run this Core process internally (embedded) or simply connect to a remote endpoint. Bridge Nodes also have the option of being an active validator in the Consensus network.
  2. Validate and erasure code the “raw” blocks
  3. Supply block shares with data availability headers to Light Nodes in the DA network.

bridge-node-diagram

From an implementation perspective, Bridge Nodes run two separate processes:

  1. celestia-app with celestia-core (see repo)

    • celestia-app is the state machine where the application and the proof-of-stake logic is run. celestia-app is built on Cosmos SDK and also encompasses celestia-core.
    • celestia-core is the state interaction, consensus and block production layer. celestia-core is built on Tendermint Core, modified to store data roots of erasure coded blocks among other changes (see ADRs).

  2. celestia-node (see repo)

    • celestia-node augments the above with a separate libp2p network that serves data availability sampling requests. The team sometimes refers to this as the “halo” network.

Hardware requirements​

The following hardware minimum requirements are recommended for running the bridge node:

  • Memory: 32 GB RAM
  • CPU: 6 cores
  • Disk: 5 TB SSD Storage (Recommended 10 TB SSD Storage)
  • Bandwidth: 1 Gbps for Download/1 Gbps for Upload

Setting up your bridge node​

The following tutorial is done on an Ubuntu Linux 20.04 (LTS) x64 instance machine.

Setup the dependencies​

Follow the tutorial here installing the dependencies here.

Deploy the Celestia bridge node​

Install Celestia Node​

Install the celestia-node binary, which will be used to run the bridge node.

Follow the tutorial for installing celestia-node here.

Initialize the bridge node​

Run the following:

celestia bridge init --core.ip <ip-address>
tip

The --core.ip gRPC port defaults to 9090, so if you do not specify it in the command line, it will default to that port. You can add the port after the IP address or use the --core.grpc.port flag to specify another port if you prefer.

Please refer to the ports section for information on which ports are required to be open on your machine.

If you need a list of RPC endpoints to connect to, you can check from the list here

Here is an example of initializing the bridge node:

celestia bridge init --core.ip rpc-mocha.pops.one

Run the bridge node​

Start the bridge node with a connection to a validator node's gRPC endpoint (which is usually exposed on port 9090):

celestia bridge start --core.ip <ip-address>
tip

The --core.ip gRPC port defaults to 9090, so if you do not specify it in the command line, it will default to that port. You can add the port after the IP address or use the --core.grpc.port flag to specify another port if you prefer.

Please refer to the ports section for information on which ports are required to be open on your machine.

If you need a list of RPC endpoints to connect to, you can check from the list here

Here is an example of starting the bridge node:

celestia bridge start --core.ip rpc-mocha.pops.one:26657

You can create your key for your node by following the cel-key instructions here

Once you start the bridge node, a wallet key will be generated for you. You will need to fund that address with Testnet tokens to pay for PayForBlob transactions. You can find the address by running the following command:

./cel-key list --node.type bridge --keyring-backend test --p2p.network <network>

You can get testnet tokens from:

NOTE: If you are running a bridge node for your validator it is highly recommended to request Mocha testnet tokens as this is the testnet used to test out validator operations.

Optional: run the bridge node with a custom key​

In order to run a bridge node using a custom key:

  1. The custom key must exist inside the celestia bridge node directory at the correct path (default: ~/.celestia-bridge/keys/keyring-test)
  2. The name of the custom key must be passed upon start, like so:
celestia bridge start --core.ip <ip> --keyring.accname <name_of_custom_key>

Optional: start the bridge node with SystemD​

Follow the tutorial on setting up the bridge node as a background process with SystemD here.

You have successfully set up a bridge node that is syncing with the network.