Validators and staking

How Dznye Chain agrees on every block: validators lock up DZY, vote by stake, lose part of it for cheating, and earn half the fees for the blocks they make.

Validators are the computers that keep the chain honest. Each one checks every payment and signs every block. This page explains how they agree, what they risk, and how someone becomes one.

How a block is agreed

1. Gather. Signed payments wait in a queue. Roughly once a second (when there is something to do), a block is put together.
2. Propose. Validators take turns. The one whose turn it is proposes the next block.
3. Vote twice. Every validator checks the block itself and votes. A block is final once validators holding more than two thirds of all the staked DZY have signed it.
4. Next. If the proposer is offline or slow, the next validator takes over, so the chain keeps going.

This is the Tendermint method, a published and widely used design. Two different blocks can never both be final unless validators holding more than a third of the stake sign both, which is provable cheating and is punished.

What that means for you

• No forks. There is one history, not two competing ones.
• It keeps going when a validator goes offline, as long as more than two thirds of the stake is up.
• If too many are offline, it waits. It never splits in two, and picks up where it left off when they return.
• A validator cannot forge your payment, create DZY, or change an old block.

Staking

To be a validator, you lock up DZY. This is your promise.

The 14-day wait matters: even after you ask to leave, your stake can still be taken if you are caught cheating, so nobody can cheat and walk away in the same moment.

What happens if a validator misbehaves

Signing two different blocks

Anyone can prove it by sending the two signed votes to the chain. The cheater loses 5% of everything it staked (including what is unlocking) and its place for good. The person who sent the proof gets a tenth of that, and the rest goes to the treasury. Validators look for this themselves and send proofs automatically.

Being offline too much

A validator that misses its turn 12 times in a row is benched: it leaves the set until it asks to come back, after at least a day. It loses no stake for this. If the whole network was stuck, nobody is blamed.

How the network grows

The network starts with one validator and grows by adding more as people use it, planned at about one for every 10,000 users. Each new validator spreads control further. You can see the current set, their stakes and any benched or barred keys in the explorer. Staking takes over from the starting validator once it stakes its own DZY, or once four different keys have staked.

A validator cannot forge payments, create DZY or change a block others already hold. Block order is decided by the validators holding more than two thirds of the staked DZY, which is why the plan is to spread stake across many independent operators.

Becoming a validator

1. Run a node with your own validator key. See Run a node.
2. Get at least 1,000 DZY into the same account.
3. Stake it (in the wallet under More, or with node chain/cli.mjs stake bond).
4. Your node waits on standby until your stake is high enough, then votes from the next block.

Tips for validators

• Keep each validator key on one machine, and back it up offline.
• Let validators reach each other over a private network (firewall the /consensus path to the other validators only), while the read API and POST /tx stay public.
• Watch your node with node chain/launch/check.mjs, and use the planned-stop setting for coordinated upgrades. The chain/launch/RUNBOOK.md covers all of it.
• Independent operators are welcome: every new validator makes the network stronger.