Activate a DV

If you have successfully created a distributed validator and you are ready to activate it, congratulations! 🎉

Once you have connected all of your Charon clients together, synced all of your ethereum nodes such that the monitoring indicates that they are all healthy and ready to operate, ONE operator may proceed to deposit and activate the validator(s).

The deposit-data.json to be used to deposit will be located in each operator's .charon folder. The copies across every node should be identical and any of them can be uploaded.

danger

If you are being given a deposit-data.json file that you didn't generate yourself, please take extreme care to ensure this operator has not given you a malicious deposit-data.json file that is not the one you expect. Cross reference the files from multiple operators if there is any doubt. Activating the wrong validator or an invalid deposit could result in complete theft or loss of funds.

Use any of the following tools to deposit. Please use the third-party tools at your own risk and always double check the staking contract address.

• Obol Distributed Validator Launchpad
• ethereum.org Staking Launchpad
• From a SAFE Multisig:
  (Repeat these steps for every validator to deposit in your cluster)
  • From the SAFE UI, click on New Transaction then Transaction Builder to create a new custom transaction
  • Enter the beacon chain contract for Deposit on mainnet - you can find it here
  • Fill the transaction information
  • Set amount to 32 in ETH
  • Use your deposit-data.json to fill the required data : pubkey,withdrawal credentials,signature,deposit_data_root. Make sure to prefix the input with 0x to format them in bytes
  • Click on Add transaction
  • Click on Create Batch
  • Click on Send Batch, you can click on Simulate to check if the transaction will execute successfully
  • Get the minimum threshold of signatures from the other addresses and execute the custom transaction

The activation process can take a minimum of 16 hours, with the maximum time to activation being dictated by the length of the activation queue, which can be weeks.