Tips for Staking Energi NRG profitably + Masternodes by VoskCoin
Here’s how we are earning passive income in Crypto staking NRG!
VoskCoin has covered Energi staking and masternodes numerous times over the last couple of years, and to be honest, we’ve learned a lot along the way. This guide will serve as a collection of our tips and tricks along with our full tutorial video guide.
First things first, you should learn what Energi 3.0 is, and how they’re basically an ETH competitor with DASH masternodes and a proof of stake blockchain enabling users to earn passive income staking NRG coins and running NRG masternodes.
Energi NRG 3.0 is a blockchain, every minute there is a new NRG block, each block is worth 22.88 NRG. Energi has no max supply, and about 1,000,000 coins are minted every month. 22.28 block reward x 43,800 minutes in a month (or blocks) equals 1,000,392 NRG coins. We derive our rewards and thus passive income through staking masternodes from these newly minted NRG coins. You can view our earnings in real-time here, and see the last 24 hours of NRG staking profitability below.
In our research posted to VoskCoinTalk, we compared Energi NRG staking earnings vs NRG masternode earnings, and in our test staking was more profitable even though staking gets a smaller piece of the pie (10% vs 40% of block rewards). We recommend at least 500 NRG coins to stake, even though you technically only need 1 coin and you’ll need 1,000 NRG coins to see close to 1 daily stake reward.
Can we actually get to the NRG staking and masternode guide?!
First things first, you’ll need a computer. It is best to use a VPS, because Linux has the best uptime and least latency. If you sign-up with Digital Ocean to rent a VPS using our referral link, you get $100 for free, and you support our work!
The other options are using your own Windows computer, or your own Mac, or your own Linux server you have deployed yourself. We have tested staking NRG on all three options and found that Linux was the best option, followed by Mac, and then Windows for running a full node.
This splits the guide into three paths, based on the Operating System (OS) you are using, refer to the official Energi Gen 3 guides for each OS below.
Please refer to the above-written guides and our video guide for the specifics on setting up the actual core node. You’ll definitely want to bootstrap your chain data, otherwise, your node will literally take days to sync up, download the latest chain data here under #3.
Let’s go ahead and set up our VPS for staking and masternodes!
So we head over to Digital Ocean and click on create droplet (server). The $5 a month VPS with a 25 GB SSD works for running an NRG node, however, choosing the $10 a month server with a 50 GB SSD future proofs our server and allows for the room if we need to resync the blockchain in case of a chain split without needed to ensure we delete all traces of the previous chain. This issue actually happened to me and with my limited Linux skills, it was easier to just deploy a fresh server! Official NRG documentation recommends Ubuntu 18.04, we also set our server name to nrgstaker like their tutorial.
There are better security practices than what we show in this written and video guide, you should research SSH keys and how to use them in Digital Ocean, your VPS, and your personal computer.
Your next step is to simply login to your server, we are using our Mac and Terminal for this, but you could use Windows and PuTTY or the terminal built into Digital Ocean. Simply grab the IP address and type the below command in, replacing my IP address 67.205.183.62 with yours.
ssh root@67.205.183.62
BIG TIP #1 install pwgen on Linux
The auto-setup install bash script was not populating a password for me, which was making me unable to set up my NRG full node to earn coins with!
The first thing you should do after logging into your server is to run the command, apt-get update, and then apt-get install pwgen, to fix this.
apt-get updateOnce that completes, run the apt-get install pwgen command.
apt-get install pwgenIn the next step when you run the NRG bash setup script, this will allow your server to correctly populate a password for you, as shown below.
Let’s set up our VPS to stake NRG and run as a masternode!
So we have set up our VPS server and logged into it, so we are going to run the bash script from the NRG team that automatically sets up the core Energi node.
bash -ic "$(wget -4qO- -o- raw.githubusercontent.com/energicryptocurrency/energi3-provisioning/master/scripts/linux/energi3-linux-installer.sh)" ; source ~/.bashrc
Write down your username and password in a secure place, select a new server install, allow the string of functions to complete. You should set up two-factor authentication, but we are not in this tutorial, but we do on our real servers.
Do not import a Keystore, Firefox discontinued Firefox Send. We will review how to create a Keystore and import it to your server soon.
If you have technical questions for setting up your NRG core node, you can ask NRG support directly on Twitter.
You can check to see if your NRG node is running with
systemctl status energi3You can manually start your NRG node with
systemctl start energi3You can manually stop your NRG node with
systemctl stop energi3TIP If you ever try to use a command and it won’t let you try putting sudo before that command, as shown below. Sudo is often needed when you are logged in as nrgstaker and not root.
sudo systemctl stop energi3
Create and import an Energi3 NRG Keystore
So first you need a wallet to import, download MyEnergiWallet here. Click don’t have a wallet and generate a Keystore, open it with any text editor ex. wordpad and textedit. It should read similar to the contents pasted below.
{"version":3,"id":"bceca6d6-6783-4317-9db1-e82346799fd7","address":"b504122fa384e5f5167dac6646994b5a45636a3d","crypto":{"ciphertext":"65e7e71adad09ab0b63b681c85f41137e7c02a3bab440255180613cf1ffbd995","cipherparams":{"iv":"bb9401a0a4f43cbc250a958140c507a1"},"cipher":"aes-128-ctr","kdf":"scrypt","kdfparams":{"dklen":32,"salt":"cfd798a9a5f52add60b4cebbea9bccb422ae9f27f6351a7c904afa7bb280de88","n":8192,"r":8,"p":1},"mac":"7086d2cd010d1887a2ad6610bf2d72afec7b975a72b1cfc6ed2789e1816ec0e3"}}Now, on your server, you need to transfer your Keystore into your VPS. To do this we are going to use nano, you should replace the bolded portion with your Keystore file name.
nano /home/nrgstaker/.energicore3/keystore/UTC--2020-11-06T01-20-42.303Z--b504122fa384e5f5167dac6646994b5a45636a3d_yt
After you paste your Keystore file guts into there using nano, hit ctrl x, y (for yes), and then enter.
You’re currently connected as root, you need to switch to nrgstaker
Simply use the su command to switch from root to nrgstaker
su nrgstakerAfter that, we need to access the NRG node console with energi3 attach.
energi3 attachNow check if you imported your address correctly with personal.listAccounts
If you did all of this properly, you will see your correct wallet address there, that matches the name on your Keystore file.
personal.listAccounts
Now use the exit command, to exit the energi3 console
exitAlright, deep breath, now you have created a server, set up the basics with it, generated an NRG wallet, you’ll obviously need to add NRG coins to your wallet to be able to stake coins or run a masternode too.
If you want to buy or sell Energi NRG KuCoin is currently the best option.
So yeah, you have all of the above and coins in your wallet address. You imported your wallet address AKA Keystore to your server via the copy and paste echo method shown above. Huge thanks to
for helping us figure that out.
Now it is time to fire up the staking right?! Well.. almost, we are going to bootstrap the chaindata, because otherwise, it will take several days for your node to fully sync with the blockchain.
Trust me, you’ll want to bootstrap the blockchain onto your node, so let’s start
sudo systemctl stop energi3Then run this command to remove the old blockchain data
energi3 removedbThis is where it should tell you that your Database successfully deleted, like the above screenshot. Now, run these commands to download the new chaindata, this will take several minutes or more, take a break!
cd $HOME
curl -s https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/download.energi.software/releases/chaindata/mainnet/gen3-chaindata.tar.gz | tar xvzWhen this finishes fire your NRG node back up with
sudo systemctl start energi3Now the NRG node is running again, enter the console with energi3 attach
energi3 attach
Finally! This is my favorite and most used command!
miner.stakingStatus()The miner.stakingStatus() command shows you the current block height of your NRG node, and if staking is enabled. We are about to enable staking to turn that from false to true, and you want your block height to be ~the same as the current block height shown on the Energi NRG block explorer.
So let’s go ahead and enable staking on our server with this command, remember to replace our address with yours, and then enter your password.
personal.unlockAccount('0xb504122fa384e5f5167dac6646994b5a45636a3d', null, 0, true)Remember, if your block height does not match the block height of the NRG block explorer, your blockchain is not fully synced and it will not show your node as staking = true until then. Total blocks define the current blockchain block height, at the time of this write-up, the NRG blockchain consists of 345,410 blocks.
Monitor your staking and masternode profitability
I simply frequently check my NRG address on the Energi block explorer here. You can simply replace my address in the URL with yours, and it will show your results. Congratulations, that’s it!
Energi3 NRG masternodes?!
You pretty much have to do everything above before getting to the masternodes section, even when running an NRG masternode you should also be staking the NRG coins that cannot be rolled up into a masternode. 1,000 NRG coins can be rolled into 1 NRG masternode. This guide will not be covering masternodes, please refer to the official NRG documentation on how to set up an Energi NRG masternode on their 3.0 blockchain.
Troubleshooting tips for your Energi NRG node
Was your NRG node working but now you are not getting an staking or masternode rewards?! You probably ended up on a bad chain, simple answer is just that, that happens sometimes. These commands are how I quickly fix my node and begin earning passive income with cryptocurrency again!
rm preimages.rlp
sudo systemctl stop energi3
wget https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/download.energi.software/releases/chaindata/mainnet/preimages.rlp
energi3 import-preimages preimages.rlp
sudo systemctl start energi3If importing preimages does not fix your NRG node, so it looks like it is working but you are not earning staking rewards — which basically means their was a chainsplit and your node ended up on the wrong chain, which simply put just happens sometimes, then you can also fix your node by deleting the blockchain data, and bootstrapping it again.
sudo systemctl stop energi3
energi3 removedb
cd $HOME
curl -s https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/download.energi.software/releases/chaindata/mainnet/gen3-chaindata.tar.gz | tar xvzRemember you will need to restart your Energi node after this finishes, you will also need to unlock your wallet for staking again.
sudo systemctl start energi3
energi3 attach
personal.unlockAccount('0xe9Ba55c5CBFCdFddcBaaB305Ed145FE5F8b8b74a', null, 0, true)Reminder, the node has to finish resyncing to the latest block height, and then you will be eligible to earn staking and masternode rewards once again, you can always check this after energi3 attach, with our favorite and most used command.
miner.stakingStatus()
I hope you enjoyed the VoskCoin YouTube write-up on NRG nodes!
Staking cryptocurrencies and running crypto masternodes is not incredibly hard, but it is certainly not simple either. We are no experts, but I have tested this guide numerous times to ensure that it successfully enables staking on the NRG 3.0 blockchain! I hope that if this guide helps you, you decide to subscribe to the VoskCoin YouTube channel and follow us on the VoskCoin Medium blog!
