vipnode

Connect instantly with your Ethereum Light Client to a premium VIPNode.

Status: v2.0 is released, work on v3 is suspended: https://medium.com/vipnode/what-happened-to-vipnode-90530fc78018

More background on Vipnode in this blog post: An economic incentive for running Ethereum Full Nodes

vipnode v1: Solo Node

How does it work?

On the front-end, there's a smart contract, contracts/vipnode.sol.

The smart contract keeps the state of which enode is registered and what the expiration time is.

There is a DApp which allows people to register.

On the back-end, it's running a modified version of go-ethereum, the patchset is here.

The geth-vipnode is driven by some JavaScript which loads the smart contract and monitors events of new registered members, see run.js.

vipnode v2: Node Pools

A vipnode pool that third-party full-nodes can join and get proportional payout based on the light nodes they serve.

How does it work?

• vipnode-host frontend: Registration process to join the vipnode pool.
• vipnode-client frontend: Registration process (can be a smart contract, or anything else) to associate a light client's enodeID with the account.
• vipnode-pool will act as a bootstrapping server, routing connecting vipnode light clients to the next available vipnode full node.
• vipnode-pool will keep track of which light client is connected to which full node, and other usage-related analytics.
• vipnode-pool will keep track of full node availability and capacity, in order to avoid routing light clients if the full node is full or down.
• vipnode-host will run on fulll nodes which will interface with the geth or parity RPC and keep track of which enodeIDs need to be whitelisted, and which ones are connected and for how long (from the host's perspective).
• vipnode-client will implement an vipnode-pool API to:
  1. Register the current enodeID (if not already registered)
  2. Send back the set of connected peers (to allow time-usage billing), from the client's perspective.

vipnode v3: TBD

Work on this milestone is suspended until several ecosystem blockers are resolved, see blog post for details: https://medium.com/vipnode/vipnode-2-0-released-9af1d65b4552

License

MIT.