Preferred Node Operator (PNO) Tutorial

Becoming a preferred node operator in Node Cloud is an exciting opportunity for professional node runners who have excellent operations and want to run software for future restaking applications and get additional revenue. This guide will walk you through how to become a preferred operator and what the prerequisites involve.

Note: this guide is for Holesky testnet only.

Prerequisites and Steps

  • Installation of MEV Plus
  • Native delegation of the node validators
  • Acquiring PNO status
  • Using PNO module to configure liquid delegations

1) Installation of MEV Plus

If that has not been completed follow this guide:

https://docs.restaking.cloud/middleware/tutorials/install-native-delegation

2) Native delegation

Make sure the native delegation of your Holesky validators has taken place.

To verify whether it has been successful: https://docs.restaking.cloud/k2docs/k2subgraph

The subgraph for Holesky is as follows: https://api.studio.thegraph.com/query/45760/k2-holesky/version/latest

3) Acquiring PNO Status

PNO Status on Holesky is contingent on doing at least one native delegation to the K2 platform.

4) Using PNO module to configure liquid delegations

In order to start receiving liquid delegations (including self delegations) so that you can start running software the following module will need to be installed on your MEV Plus instance:

https://github.com/restaking-cloud/pno-for-plus/releases

Note: This module will only work when there are active native delegations on Holesky so make sure that is done first.

Installing PNO for MEV Plus

1) Ensure that the MEV Plus software has been stopped

If the service is called mevPlus, the following will do the trick:

sudo systemctl stop mevPlus

2) Ensure that you are running the latest version of MEV Plus

MEV Plus version v1.0.0 or higher is required: https://github.com/pon-network/mev-plus/releases/tag/v1.0.0

3) Install the module

Run the following command on the MEV Plus binary to install the PNO module:

go run mevPlus.go modules -install github.com/restaking-cloud/pno-for-plus@latest

and that’s it! MEV Plus will tell you if it has successfully installed.

4) Rebuild MEV Plus

In exactly the same way as building from source, re-build MEV Plus and copy that to /usr/local/bin.

5) Update the MEV Plus configuration

You can add the following flags to get the PNO module going:

-pno.eth1-private-key 1234567890abcdef1234567890abcdef12345f \
-pno.beacon-node-url <same_as_native_delegation_k2_module> \
-pno.execution-node-url <same_as_native_delegation_k2_module> \
-pno.auto-redelegate

Where the pno.eth1-private-key is the wallet that will pay for GAS and is also the wallet that did the native delegation on Holesky.

Save the system files for Plus and reload systemctl to pick up the new service file:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

Then you can fire up MEV Plus again.

Looking forward to getting feedback so if there are any issues faced let us know.