Hyperledger Besu QBFT network

This repository contains all the configutations and instructions to bootstrap a Besu blockchain network with QBFT consensus protocol.

Current network configuration consists on 4 validator nodes, disposed in a $K_4$ graph network topology, with the following properties:

• Block time of 3s, and 9s of timeout for each validation round
• Block reward of 5 ETH that decreases exponentially every year until leaving no block reward on the 10th year
• On-chain validator election, requiring more than the 66% of the votes of current validators to add a new one or remove an existing one
• On-chain permissioning for network nodes and wallet addresses

In this repository we use Besu 22.10.3, in its dockerized version. To get the Besu docker image execute

docker pull hyperledger/besu:22.10.3

Generating the keys for the nodes

We can generate the keys for the nodes using the script new_key.sh from the scripts directory.

./scripts/new_key.sh validator1
./scripts/new_key.sh validator2
./scripts/new_key.sh validator3
./scripts/new_key.sh validator4

After executing the previous commands the keys (private key, address and enode) for each node can be found in a directory with the node's name inside the newly created keys directory.

Completing the genesis file

Network's genesis file, genesis.json, needs to be completed as it lacks the bytecode (<Contract Code>) and the storage values (<Storage Object>) for the validator smart contract.

To obtain this missing information we must follow the instructions from sections Compiling the contract for deployment and Create the genesis file content from the https://github.com/irzinfante/validator-smart-contracts repository.

• NOTE: The content of the file initialValidators.txt can be generated running ./scripts/initialValidators.sh

Getting up the network

To get up the network we must start the nodes as services from the docker-compose.yaml file. Before that, to generate the content for the bootnodes option of Besu, we run the script

./scripts/bootnodes.sh

which generates the file bootnodes.env with the needed configuration.

Now we can get up the network with

docker-compose up -d

To check the status of the network we can use the RPC API of the validator1 node at http://127.0.0.1:8545.

Sirato explorer

To get up the network packed with the Sirato explorer from Web3 Labs execute instead the following command:

docker-compose -f docker-compose_sirato.yaml up -d

The explorer's dashboard will be abailable at http://localhost/ after the initialization of all the services.

Blockscout explorer

To get up the network packed with the Blockscout explorer execute instead the following command:

docker-compose -f docker-compose_blockscout.yaml up -d

The explorer's dashboard will be abailable at http://localhost/ after the initialization of all the services.

Compiling and deploying premissioning smart contracts

We can compile the accounts and nodes permissioning smart contracts following the instruccion from the https://github.com/irzinfante/permissioning-smart-contracts repository, which also makes references to the official Besu documentation.

To generate the content of the .env file for the Deploying the contracts step, we execute the following script in THIS repository:

./scripts/permissioning-smart-contracts.sh