Become a Keyper for Shutter Network!
This blog post provides an overview of the role and importance of Keypers within the Shutter Network. It describes the responsibilities of Keypers, who are crucial to maintaining the network's security through the generation of encryption and decryption keys.
Keypers are crucial to the Shutter Network's operations, responsible for generating encryption and decryption keys to secure network transactions. This vital role supports a system that prevents 'malicious MEV' and promotes fairness in DeFi, playing a significant part in the wider Ethereum ecosystem. The setup and operation of this role are not complex or expensive. Check out towards the end of this post on how to apply to become a Keyper!
The Integral Role of a Keyper in the Shutter Network
In the Shutter Network, Keypers have an important job: they keep the protocol running by generating certain encryption and decryption keys.
As a Keyper, you'd be operating a node that creates these keys for different uses, such as votes in the Snapshot integration of Shutter or for transactions in any protocols where Shutter is used.
This role plays a big part in the way the Shutter Network stays secure. It involves using methods called threshold encryption and Distributed Key Generation, which the Keypers manage. These create a type of digital lock that can only be opened when a certain number of Keypers work together. This is how the network ensures that its transactions are secure and can't be tampered with before their inclusion and order are fixed.
One of the biggest jobs within the newly launched Shutter protoDAO is managing these Keypers, including running a fair Keyper Selection Process and making sure any changes to the Keypers are made properly on the blockchain.
Becoming a Keyper: Why Should You Join?
Becoming a Keyper means helping to support a system that prevents something called 'malicious MEV' and makes using DeFi fairer for everyone. Being a Keyper is also a crucial role in supporting the wider Ethereum ecosystem, including preventing fraud, reducing trust issues, and increasing resistance to censorship.
Setting up and operating a node is not complicated or expensive.
The Practicalities of Being a Keyper
Running a Keyper node is much like running an Ethereum node in terms of operations as well as system requirements. Right now, in the early stages of having an open Keyper set, we do hope to have professional node operators join us, but all applications/proposals are welcome!
The operation of a Keyper node includes minimal downtime, regular maintenance, and software upgrades to the Keyper client. In the future, software updates will be available via Docker images.
A system with 16GB DDR4 memory should be sufficient, along with a decent CPU, an Intel i5 range one, and an SSD. An example of a system capable of running the Keyper node would be a specific device for node running a like a Dappnode.
Becoming a Keyper
Creating a Keyper Proposal
To become a Keyper, you would need to propose this in the Shutter Forum to be added to the "potential Keyper list." This doesn't involve any Snapshot proposals and means that Keypers are chosen by the community, which helps build trust.
The protoDAO Voting Process
Once the period for posting proposals has been concluded, a member creates a list of the applications and puts forward a proposal on Snapshot. The other members of the protoDAO then vote on this list using weighted voting. If the vote is successfully passed and the accepted Keyper set determined, there is a cooldown period before the proposal is executed by the multisig group, updating the list of Keypers on the Gnosis Chain.
Setup and Operation
The computational requirements for running a Keyper node for the Shutter Network are pretty low.
However, it must be ensured that the Keyper remains online and available as much as possible since a supermajority of all Keypers is required for decryption key generation to work.
To ensure availability, the system running the Keyper should have a permanent internet connection (i.e., no residential DSL, cable, etc. connections.).
We recommend the following minimum hardware specs:
- 1 CPU core
- 2 GB RAM
- 50GB disk
We also strongly advise using a monitoring system to ensure continued availability.
More to come!
Ready to take the next step towards becoming a Keyper? We encourage you to post your proposal at the Shutter Forum!
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The proposals are now open on a rolling basis. The protoDAO periodically reviesw the applications before they are moved to a vote.
Don't forget to follow the Shutter Twitter account for updates and register on the Shutter Forum to keep up with what's happening in the community.
