Dispatch Testnet and Wallet Walkthrough

The Dispatch Testnet Alpha is live and YOU can experience it for yourself

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Dispatch

3 min readMar 20, 2018

Video version of this article

Dispatch Labs is happy to announce the successful launch of our first live Testnet! We’ve been hard at work implementing the brand new DAPoS (Delegated Asynchronous Proof-of-Stake) consensus algorithm, and it’s working! We’ve even developed a starter Wallet UI so you can play around with your test ‘patches’. Here we’ll walk through how to interact with the testnet using the web UI, and how to start/use your very own Disgo node.

Using the Web UI:

Here are the basic step-by-step instructions on how to use the web wallet.

Step 1: Go to http://wallet.dispatchlabs.io

This is a wallet service we’re hosting to make things easy for you and your grandma. We’ve got details on your balance and all of your transaction history according to our current delegates.

Pro-tip: don’t post your private key to a company blog like this

Step 2: Make a new wallet

Go to the hamburger menu in the top right
Select “My Wallet”
Click “Generate New Wallet”
Click “Save”

Discord is where all of our development communication happens

Step 3: Get someone to send you some tokens!

If you don’t know anyone who has some tokens to share with you, come on by our Discord channel to say hi and we’ll happily send you some test tokens for you to play around with.

When you’ve received your tokens, you should see the transaction in each of the Delegates’ records.

Step 4: Send some tokens!

Now you have some test tokens to spend and to share. Send some to your friends, your professors, your dog, etc.

Go to the hamburger menu in the top right
Select “Send Tokens”
Enter a wallet address and an amount
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Running your own node:

***Warning**** This part of the walkthrough is for the technically inclined. If you like cloning repos, installing dependencies, and CURLing APIs, read on.

Screenshot of our DAPoS proof-of-concept testing

Step 1: Clone the Disgo repo

Make sure you have Golang installed and up to date on your machine and run

go get github.com/dispatchlabs/disgo

Step 2: Run the Disgo code

cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/dispatchlabs/disgo
go run main.go

Step 3: Find your address

A private key and wallet address are automatically generated for you on node startup

cat $GOPATH/src/github.com/dispatchlabs/disgo/config/wallet.json

Step 4: Get someone to send you some tokens!

Come ask in our Discord channel, and we’ll be happy to send you some tokens

Step 5: Check your balance

curl 'http://localhost:1975/v1/balance/{your_address_here}'

Step 6: Send some tokens!

curl -X POST -d '{
"privateKey”:”{your_private_key}”,
"from”:”{your_address_here}“,
"to”:”{destination_address_here}“,
"value":100}' 'http://localhost:1975/v1/test_transaction'

DISCLAIMER

The testnet is working but still mostly untested. We’re doing our stress testing on a separate network to keep this demo alive. Please don’t try to break this testnet because you probably can. As we roll out more features, we’re likely to reset the state pretty often, so don’t be surprised if your balance drops to zero periodically; it means we’re making progress. ❤

If you enjoyed this article and like what we’re building at Dispatch Labs, please give us some claps👏 or share. Join our Telegram or Discord channels to say hey.