Educational Byte: How to Become an Order Provider in Obyte

Since the beginning, Obyte was designed to become fully decentralized, much more decentralized than other networks. The Order Providers (OPs, previously witnesses) exist exactly for this purpose, and everyone can become one —if they meet the criteria.

In the Obyte network, which uses a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), transactions are directly connected without the need for blocks, miners, or block producers —middlemen, in other words. Instead, users add new transactions that link to previous ones, creating the DAG structure by themselves.

Only to ensure transactions are ordered in some way and prevent double-spending, Obyte relies on Order Providers. These are typically respected individuals or organizations that add their own transactions, acting as reference points for ordering the rest of the chain. While they receive a portion of transaction fees, their primary motivation is the well-being of the community because they often have skin in the game.

To become an OP node, here’s what you’ll need to do:

Becoming an Order Provider: Important Requirements

Order Providers don’t have a lot of power over the network, unlike miners or “validators”. They can’t double-spend, steal funds, or censor transactions. However, this is still an important role, because without their guiding transactions, the chain would be paralyzed (at least until they’re replaced). Therefore, some requirements are in order.

The Obyte network has space for 12 OPs, and all of them should be approved by a majority vote of the community. Currently, there are seven Order Provider nodes controlled by independent parties, and five still controlled by the founder (Tony Churyumoff), in the absence of adequate candidates. Of course, the more independent parties in the game, the more decentralized Obyte would be.

Requirements to become an OP in Obyte include:

• Not anonymous: have a publicly known real name and/or company.

• To be well-known and trusted in the community.

• Having a lot to lose (material and/or nonmaterial) in case of misbehavior. The loss is the business (outside Obyte) and/or reputation.

• Have enough technical expertise and adequate hardware to ensure uninterrupted operation 24/7 and security of their private keys (they must not be stolen and used to post on their behalf).

• Adapt their own OP list when the community wants to change it in some way and the new candidate satisfies the above rules. That includes removing themselves from the list.

  
  

The above is what is expected from the candidates, it’s not strictly requirements. Anyone who fails some of these requirements can still be voted in by the community —if the community wants so.

What to do next?

If you think that you meet the requirements, the first step would likely be downloading and configuring an Order Provider node to your own device from GitHub. It’s necessary to install Node.js, clone the repository, and, preferably, use Tor to keep your IP address unknown to potential attackers. This is only a start, though. You must consider that this node will only spend GBYTE in transaction fees (very small amounts) in the beginning, without anything in return at first.

You’ll need to share your candidacy with the community through the official Obyte channels and accounts in social media (Discord, Telegram, Reddit, Twitter, etc.), and make sure to state who you are and why you want to become an Order Provider. Previous candidates have shared a complete article with a FAQ about this topic on Medium, including their OP node address.

Next, a poll can be conducted via the Obyte wallet [Chat – Bot Store – Poll Bot] for anyone to vote on your candidacy. If the majority approves, then you can become an official OP, available to pick by wallet users. That’s another important thing to consider: users can select and change their own OP list from the same wallet. If they don’t want to list your node to guide their transactions, they won’t.

And that’s it! Once the community has accepted you, be sure to keep your node running 24/7 and your private keys in a safe place. Some rewarding GBYTEs will come to your wallet for your services after enough guiding transactions.