Validators, Storage Nodes, Light Nodes — The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Nodes

6 min readJun 13, 2024

Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. This article does not indicate any position of Satea. web3, blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies, etc. are potentially risky, so please be sure to exercise caution and independent research before engaging in any related products, services or investments.

Since the current bull market, although Bitcoin has hit new peaks, the traditional interactive airdrop rewards are not as good as in the past, and the threshold for airdrop eligibility for high-quality projects is getting higher and higher. As seen from the airdrop rules of star projects like Celestia and DYM, staking and testnet nodes are gradually becoming the preferred choice for high-yield airdrops.

Compared to staking, participating as a node runner in the construction of a testnet phase project has a lower financial threshold, but requires a higher level of skill from the participant and more uncertainty in rewards. Therefore, it also requires participants to have a clear understanding of the types of nodes in different projects.In this article, various nodes and ways to participate will be explained in the context of current market hotspots.

Blockchain nodes and DePIN nodes, are not the same thing!

A lot of new beginners are confused when they are presented with hot projects in the market, why running some projects requires a high-performance GPU, while others only have requirements for CPU, memory and storage. Firstly, let’s clarify a concept, “blockchain node”.

Blockchain nodes are the basic parts of the blockchain network that are responsible for storing, verifying and disseminating blockchain data. Blockchain requires the support of a large number of nodes to be able to record transaction information, process smart contracts, etc. in a decentralised manner. It is the involvement of these nodes that guarantees the decentralisation and security of the blockchain. For example, whether it is the Miner in Bitcoin, the ETH Staking to Activate Validator in Ether, or the Validator Node of the recent market hot projects like 0G and Artela, or even Avail’s Light Client, all of them are blockchain nodes contributing to the secure operation of the blockchain.

The nodes of a DePIN project typically involve actual physical devices and infrastructure, such as IoT devices, wireless network devices, distributed storage devices, etc. While some of the DePIN project’s nodes also participate in the consensus mechanism of the blockchain network, most of the DePIN nodes rely more on their physical attributes to provide real-world services for incentives. For example, the Worker of the AI computing power DePIN project io.net needs to provide the computing power required by AI, and thus has high requirements on GPUs, and there are similar projects such as Kuzco, Titan, Aethir, etc.; and the network resource DePIN projects such as Grass need to provide idle network resources, and thus have high requirements on network bandwidth.

The DePIN project was originally designed to improve resource efficiency by allowing providers with underutilised resources to “rent” them out to other consumers, to ensure that idle resources are not wasted. This also means that most DePIN nodes do not need to be online all the time, and participants can “rent” their own hardware resources such as computing power, storage, bandwidth, etc. to the DePIN project when they are idle.

Blockchain nodes, why does the difficulty of deploying different kinds of nodes vary so much?

Node types vary in different blockchain networks. Taking the mainstream public chain PoS as an example, there are three types of nodes: Full Nodes, Archive Nodes and Light Nodes.

Full Nodes:

A node that stores and validates the complete data of the Ethernet blockchain. Full nodes download and retain detailed information about each block and transaction, and participate in block validation and dissemination through consensus mechanisms. Validator Nodes are also a type of Full Nodes that participate in block proposal and validation by staking cryptocurrencies to ensure the security and consensus of the blockchain network. Hence, it requires high computing power (multi-core high-performance CPUs, large memory capacity) and high-speed network bandwidth, as well as regular maintenance and updates to keep up with the network. In addition, Full Nodes need to store the complete data of the blockchain, and Ethernet full nodes currently have more than 1100 GB of storage capacity.

Most popular projects explicitly incentivise the expected testnet nodes to be Validator nodes, e.g. Artela, Initia, etc. explicitly state that they will airdrop incentives to eligible testnet Validator nodes.

Archive Nodes:

Nodes that keep all historical state and state changes of the blockchain. Besides storing the full block and transaction data, they also keep every state change generated by each block. Archive Nodes record the full history of the blockchain, providing access to any historical state for applications that require detailed historical data. This also makes archive nodes more difficult to deploy and requires very large storage space, which on the Ethernet Geth client is already over 12 TB in 2023. Moreover, they likewise require high-speed network bandwidth and stronger network maintenance capabilities to handle large amounts of data storage and management.

Light Nodes:

Light Nodes download only the block header information and not the full block data. They rely on full nodes to fetch and verify transaction data for Simplified Payment Verification (SPV). Deployment conditions are simple, even mobile phones can be deployed. Light Nodes can only rely on full nodes for simple transaction validation, but there are blockchain networks with light nodes (or Light Client) that have stronger functions such as validating data, improving blockchain data usability, and reducing the load on full nodes. These types of light Nodes are simple to deploy, but may be rewarded by the project, such as Avail’s Light Client Challenge.

In addition to the above nodes, other types of nodes are set up in different blockchains for their core functions, and these nodes may also be incentivised depending on their contribution to the blockchain. For example, the modular AI-focused DA tier 0G opens up Storage Nodes, Key-Value (KV) nodes, etc., on the test network, which are responsible for maintaining the 0G storage, including timely storage and retrieval of data blocks, as well as coordinating with the 0G DAs to confirm data availability.

Getting incentives, what else does a Validator Nodes need to do?

Most projects release airdrops to Validator Nodes, especially activated, selected or top-ranked validator nodes. In addition to hardware requirements and O&M capabilities, there may be other requirements to be a top ranked or activated validator. These are typically staking volume and contribution.

Staking Volume:

As with Validator Nodes in most PoS formal networks, nodes with higher staking volumes are ranked higher. Some blockchains with staking as a core function, such as Babylon, EigenLayer, may select the top 100/200 as activated nodes. Most of the tokens required for staking in such projects need to be cross-chained with mature Bitcoin or Ether testnet tokens (e.g. BTC Signet, ETH Holesky, etc.) or directly staking with these mature testnet tokens. If wishing to be a top ranked Validator Nodes for staking, it may be necessary to spend some money to buy or mine test tokens such as BTC Signet, ETH Holesky, etc.

Contribution:

As Validator Nodes are crucial to blockchain decentralisation, cybersecurity, community governance, etc., some project parties filter the capabilities and contributions of validators during the test network phase, and encourage ecological developers to participate in node operation even more. Taking Artela as an example, in the current 300+ Validator Nodes, Artela requires verifiers to fill out a registration form and submit contributions, including community contributions, social media contributions, development technology contributions, etc. Then 35–40 validators with high ratings will be selected for activation in each phase of the test network, and receive delegation reward from Artela Foundation.

In general, after the deployment of a Validator Node, the user will generate a private key or seed phrase for that Validator Node, which will become the unique credentials for that node. Within some blockchains, users can register a regular account, bind the account address to the node private key, and receive airdrop rewards within the regular account when the project is officially airdropped.

This article introduces the main types of nodes and potential incentive nodes for popular testnet projects. If you are interested in participating in testnet nodes, you can subscribe us (Satea) and read previous tutorials on how to build nodes for other projects.

About Satea

Satea is an industry-leading DePIN and decentralized public chain node aggregator. We assist customers in completing the official application for validator nodes, and facilitate test token staking and server hosting operations with a single click, thereby lowering the barrier to participation in Web3. Satea is especially suitable for users with limited hardware resources, technical skills, or those who wish to deploy nodes quickly and in large volumes. Satea has now launched a one-click deployment service for GaiaNet (app.satea.io). A limited number of slots are available.

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