Skip to main content

BYOB - Bring Your Own Blockchain

If you want to have full control over your blockchain deployment, e.g., if you want to reset the state repeatedly or need more funds than a faucet can provide for a single account, you will need to run your own blockchain. For this purpose, we provide a Docker image which runs in standalone mode. This means that the blockchain doesn't act as a parachain but as an independent chain. There is no need to run a Relay Chain and register the KILT chain as a parachain. This greatly simplifies the setup.

You only need to start the Docker image:

docker run --rm -it -p 9944:9944 -p 9933:9933 kiltprotocol/standalone-node:latest --dev --ws-external --rpc-external

You should see output similar to the following:

2022-05-05 13:25:12 KILT Node
2022-05-05 13:25:12 āœŒļø  version 1.6.2
2022-05-05 13:25:12 ā¤ļø  by KILT <info@kilt.io>, 2019-2022
2022-05-05 13:25:12 šŸ“‹ Chain specification: Development
2022-05-05 13:25:12 šŸ·  Node name: subdued-chair-0035
2022-05-05 13:25:12 šŸ‘¤ Role: AUTHORITY
2022-05-05 13:25:12 šŸ’¾ Database: RocksDb at /tmp/substrateufCNUV/chains/development/db/full
2022-05-05 13:25:12 ā›“  Native runtime: kilt-kestrel (kilt-kestrel-0.tx3.au4)
2022-05-05 13:25:13 šŸ”Ø Initializing Genesis block/state (state: 0xb4a2ā€¦94b3, header-hash: 0x09fcā€¦3a2b)
2022-05-05 13:25:13 šŸ‘“ Loading GRANDPA authority set from genesis on what appears to be first startup.
2022-05-05 13:25:14 Using default protocol ID "sup" because none is configured in the chain specs
2022-05-05 13:25:14 šŸ·  Local node identity is: 12D3KooWMCqWaxXTQbmG9feCe4cMzjCzUKfm5T6VvGDmh8X5QHe9
2022-05-05 13:25:14 šŸ“¦ Highest known block at #0
2022-05-05 13:25:14 ć€½ļø Prometheus exporter started at 127.0.0.1:9615
2022-05-05 13:25:14 Listening for new connections on 0.0.0.0:9944.
2022-05-05 13:25:19 šŸ’¤ Idle (0 peers), best: #0 (0x09fcā€¦3a2b), finalized #0 (0x09fcā€¦3a2b), ā¬‡ 0 ā¬† 0
2022-05-05 13:25:20 Accepted a new tcp connection from 172.17.0.1:56636.
2022-05-05 13:25:23 šŸ™Œ Starting consensus session on top of parent 0x...
2022-05-05 13:25:23 šŸŽ Prepared block for proposing at 1 (3 ms) [hash: 0x...; parent_hash: 0x09fcā€¦3a2b; extrinsics (1): [0xae1aā€¦0701]]
2022-05-05 13:25:23 šŸ”– Pre-sealed block for proposal at 1. Hash now 0x..., previously 0x....

Congratulations! You are running your own KILT blockchain. šŸŽ‰

The blockchain exposes a RPC endpoint on port 9944. You can test that by calling an RPC endpoint using curl.

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"id":1, "jsonrpc":"2.0", "method": "system_name", "params":[]}' http://127.0.0.1:9944/

This should give you {"jsonrpc":"2.0","result":"KILT Node","id":1} as a response.

The --dev parameter provides a pre-funded account which you can use as a faucet, and that has the following mnemonic: receive clutch item involve chaos clutch furnace arrest claw isolate okay together.

You can create the account with the following SDK function:

// Creates an ed25519 key by default which is required to access the funds.
const devFaucet = Crypto.makeKeypairFromUri(faucetSeed)

With the new devFaucet, you can transfer funds to other accounts and test all the KILT features that require tx fee payment.

Standalone vs. Parachain (Peregrine/Spiritnet)ā€‹

The standalone chain is close in functionality to Kilt parachains but there are a few fundamental differences between them.

Governanceā€‹

While governance is an important part of Kilt parachains, it's not used in the standalone version and the Sudo pallet replaces it. None of the following pallets are part of the standalone chain, but they are all part of the parachain runtime:

  • Democracy
  • Council
  • TechnicalCommittee
  • TechnicalMembership
  • Treasury
  • Scheduler

Stakingā€‹

Staking is part of the consensus protocol and is used to elect who is allowed to produce blocks. Parachains need to have this election process as decentralized as possible. On the other hand, for a standalone development chain, it's not necessary since all nodes are probably controlled by you or your organization.

Deployment Complexityā€‹

Deploying a parachain is more complex than deploying a standalone chain. For the standalone node, a single Docker command is enough. In contrast, the task of spinning up a parachain is split into three steps.

  1. Setup a Relay Chain with 4 validators.
  2. Start and connect your parachain node to the Relay Chain.
  3. Register your parachain using the runtime WASM and the genesis state.

Since these steps are not trivial to execute and take some time to do manually, you can use this Docker-based setup script to automate the steps.

Transaction Encodingā€‹

Before transactions are sent to the chain, they are encoded and signed. The encoding depends on the runtime and can differ from chain to chain. Even the same call in the same pallet can have a different encoding for different chains, for instance, the vest()call of thevesting` pallet:

ChainEncoding of Vesting.vest()
Spiritnet0x2900
Standalone0x2100