How to become a MOI validator and earn Incentives?

You ain’t too late to this game!

Before we start off, I suggest you to first check out this blog post written by Ganesh Prasad Kumble to understand what MOI (My Own Internet) is about, their roadmap, incentive model & testnet rewards, halving, ecosystem, and mainly their protocol’s Incentivized Testnet — Indus.

Assuming that you have read the above blog post, I will continue to take you through each and every step in the process of participating as a validator.

Step 1: Create a MOI ID

Visit https://iome.ai/ and click on register in case you haven’t created a MOI ID already.

MOI ID registration page

Once you click on the NEXT button, you should see something like shown in the below image. It is very important to carefully copy the 12-word seed phrase of your wallet. This is the only way to recover your MOI wallet if you have forgotten the password. Therefore safeguarding this 12-word passphrase == peace of mind.

It is always a best practice to write it on a piece of paper & keep multiple copies of it at different places you know.

Solve a small puzzle in order to make sure if you have copied the passphrase correctly. Once you click on submit, you should land to the home page as shown below.

MOI ID Home Page after signup

Tada! You now successfully created your account! 🎉

Step 2: Perform KYC for your wallet

Now let’s complete the KYC process. This incentivized testnet program is now supported to 150+ countries including Indian residents with Aadhar card.

In the next coming days, the MOI team is opening KYC for other countries as well. Join their Discord community or follow them on Twitter to get updates on the project info, launch dates etc.

Now, hover to the bottom third button as shown in the below image

Once you click on it, you will see the option Add Aadhar. Click on it!

Enter the displayed captcha & your 12 digit Aadhar number (Again, Indians only)

Once you click on Submit, you should see the message KYC verified successfully.

Hosting a node

In this blog, I will be using Contabo, a VPS provider to set up a node.

Visit https://validator.moi.technology/ to get the binary code & to know the minimum requirements of the hardware.

I am also using Termius, an SSH app which lets you organize hosts into groups.

Once you host the server, the termius terminal will open and you will see the welcome message from the service provider as shown below.

Run the below commands in sequence:

curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_16.x | sudo -E bash -

sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

sudo npm i @nuid/zk@0.0.12 -g

npm install pm2@latest -g

sudo curl -o moipod https://validator.moi.technology/moipod/v0.5.2/moipod.linux && sudo chmod +x moipod

touch moipod.sh && chmod +x moipod.sh

echo -e “#! /bin/sh\n./moipod — username <MOI_ID_USERNAME> — password <MOI_ID_PASSWORD> — nodepass <NodePassword>” > moipod.sh
pm2 start moipod.sh
pm2 log 0

Once running all the above commands properly, wait for 6 hours and then log back in to your MOI ID account and click on My Validators

Depending on the number of nodes that are hosted, you will see those many nodes in clusters based on the location of the hosted VPS.

See your earned Incentives with your Krama IDs by clicking on the cluster

Monitor the nodes constantly so that the Heartbeat is always >95% (recommended). If it falls less than 67%, that node fails to get incentives.

Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter, or Telegram if you have any questions. Follow me and stay tuned for my upcoming posts! Thanks.