Validator

Validators are responsible for committing new blocks in the blockchain. These validators participate in the consensus protocol by broadcasting votes which contain cryptographic signatures signed by each validator's private key.

Some Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithms aim to create a "completely" decentralized system where all stakeholders (even those who are not always available online) participate in the committing of blocks. Tendermint has a different approach to block creation. Validators are expected to be online, and the set of validators is permissioned/curated by some external process. Proof-of-stake is not required, but can be implemented on top of Tendermint consensus. That is, validators may be required to post collateral on-chain, off-chain, or may not be required to post any collateral at all.

Validators have a cryptographic key-pair and an associated amount of "voting power". Voting power need not be the same.

Create your validator

You need to add your wallet key using mnemonic or create a new key and tranfer uaura to its address

 aurad keys add <key_name> 

Your auravalconspub can be used to create a new validator by staking tokens. You can find your validator pubkey by running:

$ aurad tendermint show-validator

To create your validator, just use the following command:

aurad tx staking create-validator \
  --amount=<staking-amount> \
  --pubkey=$(aurad tendermint show-validator) \
  --moniker="choose a moniker"  \
  --chain-id=<chain-id> \
  --commission-rate="0.10" \
  --commission-max-rate="0.20" \
  --commission-max-change-rate="0.01" \
  --min-self-delegation="1000000" \
  --gas="auto" \
  --gas-prices=<choose gas price> \
  --from=<key_name>

You can confirm that you are in the validator set by using a third party explorer or aurad cli

aurad query staking validators
aurad query tendermint-validator-set