Skip to main content

Timekeeping

Timekeeping is an essential component of securing the protocol. Without at least one timekeeper online there would be no block production. While it is possible to run a farmer or operator node with timekeeping activated, the ideal is that a high-spec, dedicated machine is used to mitigate processing loads altering the quality of the work they do.

Having a good number of timekeepers distributed geographically is our goal to foster a healthy network. Our hope is that our dedicated community run a number in addition to those being run by the team to ensure resilience and decentralization of the protocol.

note

There is no explicit economic incentive to running a timekeeper, however, independent timekeeping contributes to stable block production, which benefits every participant of the network.

You can read more about timekeeping in the Proof-of-Time section of the Autonomys Academy.

Hardware Requirements

Being a timekeeper has high hardware requirements to ensure that a user with a stronger machine is not able to consistently beat every other timekeeper on the network. All timekeepers are in a race with each other to generate their proofs and we need a grid of equally provisioned F1 cars rather than a mix of classes with varying power.

Note that these specs are our starting point and are subject to change as we discover the exact characteristics required to be a good timekeeper.

HardwareХарактеристики
CPU4 core+ with as high a frequency as possible. An overclocked Intel 14900k is the ideal. Note that only 1 core will be occupied with timekeeping.
RAM8GB+
Storage100GB SSD

Command Line Parameters

There are two new CLI options on the node visible with --help:

  • --timekeeper - to become a timekeeper.
  • --timekeeper-cpu-cores - to specify which cores timekeeper should use rather than random cores.