Running a Hyperledger Besu Node on the Ethereum Mainnet

A complete guide to running Hyperledger Besu on the Ethereum mainnet, including benefits, hardware and software requirements, and a step-by-step setup tutorial.

The Benefits of Running a Hyperledger Besu Node

The benefits of running an Ethereum node are two-fold. On one hand, the ecosystem as a whole will benefit from having higher distribution and decentralization of the infrastructure itself. On the other hand, you might have personal reasons to run a node.

Ecosystem benefits

• Further decentralize the Ethereum network by enabling more copies of the blockchain history for everyone to access.
• Lower latency/increased diversity (in terms of which nodes people are able to consult).

Personal benefits

• Blockchain data analysis on local machines instead of doing remote calls.
• Sending your own transactions from a node you trust, and propagating it from there.
• Developing purposes: if you’re building your own dapp or service, you will certainly benefit from having your own node to run the dapp on while developing.

Reasons why you would choose to run a Hyperledger Besu node are also two-fold:

Network client variety

• Helping the decentralization of the node-client share. The Ethereum network has lower risks of malfunctioning if the network is running on multiple clients, reducing risks of single points of failure. Historically, we’ve already seen the advantages of client diversity in the 2016 Devcon 2 Shanghai attack, where the network continued to function since the attack only affected a single client.
• The Ethereum network currently has ~75% running on the same client software. Ideally, this should be more distributed and spread out among client software.

Besu-specific features

• Tracing methods are now available in the Besu API, allowing you to request a transaction’s ordered list of calls to other smart contracts and to replay a history of a transaction and every detail included in it, such as Opcode calls to the EVM.
• Plugins are a reflection of Besu’s internal modular design. They allow you to extend Besu’s functionality and accessing additional data not available in the APIs or push data out to another third party application.
• Monitoring on Besu is fairly straight-forward thanks to the Grafana/Prometheus integration. Use it to obtain metrics on your node performance and/or get logging data.

For requirements and setup tips, read the full guide on the PegaSys blog

Originally published at https://pegasys.tech on May 7, 2020.