For Validators
For those with ability to run hardware and want to help secure the network
Note
Participating as a validator is temporarily allowed only for whitelisted accounts. The Upshot Team currently has access to whitelisted addresses. We plan to make this action permissionless soon. In the meantime, those interested in becoming validators should reach out here (opens in a new tab).
Responsibilities
Validators are responsible for operating most of the infrastructure associated with instantiating the Allora Network. They do this in three ways:
- Staking in worker nodes (data scientists) based on their confidence in said workers' abilities to produce accurate inferences.
- Operating the appchain as Cosmos validators.
- Operating Blockless (b7s) nodes that execute topic-specific weight-adjustment logic off-chain.
Executing Weight-Adjustment Logic Off-Chain
The topic-specific logic ran by validators is compiled to WASM and stored on IPFS. Our appchain calls upon validators to execute this logic in every topic.weight_cadence-length epoch. Running this WASM involves querying for the following values:
- Current set of weights between reputers and workers
- Inferences from the past epoch
- The revealed ground truth consisting of up to
topic.inference_cadence/ topic.weight_cadence-many values. In other words, it entails one ground truth value for each inference cadence within the preceding weight-adjustment epoch.
The WASM also involves committing the new weights to the appchain in a transaction. This is ultimately done by one b7s node.
Computing weight-adjustment logic off-chain saves the network validators operating expenses (because less is run on-chain), allows topic creators to write weight-adjustment logic in any language (that compiles to WASM), and lessens the need for frequent node software upgrades (because the module source code remains unchanged even as new topics are added, each with their specific weight-adjustment schemes).