Hardware requirements

If you want to run a validator node, you will first need a machine that is powerful enough to facilitate all of the required computation. We understand that for practical reasons a lot of the validators will choose one of the cloud providers. That said, the best thing from a decentralization standpoint is to run the node on your own machine.

A general remark for choosing your hardware setup is that you want the machine to have fast I/O. As such, NVMe SSD disks are recommended, as well as making sure that the network has low latency and is reliable.

Below you will find a reasonably powerful setup that should allow you to run your node comfortably, without worrying about the 'hiccups' (which can impede block production).

Hardware setup for running on your own machine

• CPU: modern desktop x86_64 (Intel, AMD) processor with at least 8 cores

• RAM: 32GB

• Storage:

  • Pruned node (recommended for validators) 500GB NVMe SSD

  • Archive node (required for RPC nodes): 2TB NVMe SSD

• Network: 100+Mbps (with low latency)

Example Cloud setup on AWS:

We recommend instances equivalent or higher than c5d.4xlarge with gp3 EBS set to 16000 IOPS. For better disk performance setups with NVMe Local Instances are recommended over EBS.

A closing remark would be that while most of the times you could get away with using slightly less powerful machines, it becomes a gamble that validators usually want no part of.