Solidus Node
How this works, explained once
Written to be read rather than skimmed.
28 articles
- What's Actually Running in Solidus Node Today (and What Isn't)Five things are true about Solidus Node right now, and they are not all true in the same way.
- What Is a Blockchain Validator?A validator is a node that proposes new blocks, checks the transactions inside them, and votes on whether the network should accept them, and it only gets to keep doing that job if enough other…
- Proof-of-Identity: Gating Validator Eligibility on Verified Human IdentityProof-of-Identity is not a way of reaching consensus: it's a proposed rule about who is allowed to participate in one.
- Verifiable Off-Chain Compute: What "GPU Optional" Actually MeansSolidus shipped a signed CUDA build on 2026-07-15. This page is about the one number it doesn't have: throughput.
- How We Let a Stranger Check Our Consensus MathWithin that scope, the consensus-safety claim underneath it doesn't have to be taken on trust.
- What Running a Solidus Node Actually Requires TodayThis page walks the exact steps to verify a solidus-node release before you run it as root, and it also tells you, plainly, the one thing that verification does not prove.
- What Would It Mean for a Network to Require Verified Identity to Participate?Every blockchain has to answer the same question before it can trust a single vote: how do you stop one person from pretending to be many?
- What HotStuff Consensus Is, and Which of the Two in This Repository Actually RunsHotStuff is a leader-based agreement protocol for a set of participants that do not trust each other.
- Byzantine Fault Tolerance, and Why Four Validators in One Process Do Not Have AnyA crash is a participant that stops. A Byzantine fault is a participant that keeps going and lies: sends one answer to you and a different one to somebody else, signs two conflicting things, or stalls selectively.
- What a Quorum Certificate Is: One Signature and a Bitmap of Who SignedA quorum agreed. Now prove it to somebody who was not there.
- What a View Change Is: A Bounded Wait, the Same Bug Fixed Twice, and a Backoff That Inverts If You Push It Far EnoughOne participant leads each round. If it says nothing, everybody else waits, and nobody is in charge of noticing.
- Leader Election: A Lottery Is Implemented, a Rotation Is Running, and the Lottery Has an Open Design QuestionSomebody has to go first. A round with two proposers is a fork; a round with none is a stall.
- How the Committee Is Chosen: It Is a List in the Genesis File, and No Transaction Can Add You To ItNot "how does the protocol sample a committee". "Could I be in it."
- Safety and Liveness: What This Chain Looked Like It Was Losing, and What It Is Actually DoingSafety is that nothing bad ever happens. For a chain: two conflicting histories are never both committed.
- Finality Here Is Deterministic, and the Wait Is Not Two Rounds. It Is Two Rounds Whenever They HappenOn a chain that mines, finality is a judgement. Nothing declares a block final; you wait for enough blocks on top that reversing it becomes implausible, and "enough" is your risk appetite rather than…
- Fork Choice: The Rule Is the Highest Certificate, and On This Deployment There Is One Database Behind All Four ValidatorsA participant sees two candidate histories. Which one does it build on?
- The Genesis Block: You Cannot Obtain Ours, and the Hash That Claims to Identify It Is a Hash of Its NameEvery chain starts from a state nobody voted on. Who the first validators are, what parameters apply, what balances exist before anything happens.
- The State Root: It Moves When State Moves and Holds When It Does Not, and You Cannot Open ItA chain's state is a large amount of data. Balances, identifiers, credentials, validator records.
- The Nonce: What a Failed Transaction Does to It, and How This Deployment Had to Be Defended From ItselfA signed transaction is a bearer object. Anybody who sees it can send it again.
- Gas, Fixed Fees, and the 70/20/10 SplitGas is a meter. A program runs, each step costs a defined amount, you set a limit and a price per unit, and you pay for what was consumed rather than for what you asked for.
- The Transaction Pool: A Queue and a Hash Set, Which Is the Right Answer When There Is Nothing to PrioritiseA transaction arrives before there is a block to put it in. Something has to hold it.
- The Anchor Transaction: What It Proves, and Why 'Governance' Here Means Anybody Who Staked the MinimumA transaction that records two values: a thirty-two-byte root, and a count of how many receipts it covers.
- libp2p: Fully Implemented, and the Running Network Does Not Use ItA networking toolkit rather than a network. It gives a peer an identity, an encrypted connection to other peers, a way to find them, and a way to broadcast a message to everyone interested in a subject.
- JSON-RPC: Eight Conformance Checks Against the Live Endpoint, and All Eight PassJSON-RPC is a very small specification, which is exactly why implementations get it wrong: the easy parts are obvious and the edges are ignored.
- The EVM Subnet: Three Identity Precompiles, an End-to-End Test, and No Network to Run It OnA separate execution environment that settles against a main chain.
- A Light Client Needs Peers, and This Deployment Has None. Two of Its Checks Already Work AnywayA full node downloads everything and checks everything. A light client downloads headers and checks proofs, so a phone, a browser or a small service can decide for itself instead of believing whoever answered.
- Validator Slashing: What the Word Actually CoversA validator with nothing to lose is a validator you cannot rely on.
- Sybil Resistance: Every Part of the Intended Answer Exists, and Each Is in a Different StateA Sybil attack is one party pretending to be many. For a chain: what stops somebody standing up a thousand participants and outvoting everybody.