Catalyst Voting Tools

A library and series of executables to aid programmers and users to interact with the voting capabilities of Catalyst.

The "voter-registration" executable aids the user in registering to vote. The executable creates a transaction, with the vote registration encoded as transaction metadata, signs the transaction, and then returns this signed transaction to the user, so they can submit it to the chain.

The "voting-tools" executable has two functions: "genesis" and "rewards". The "genesis" tool creates a genesis JSON file from a "genesis-template.json" file, populating the file with the initial funds and block-zero date. The "rewards" tool calculates the voting rewards that should be given to each user and optionally generates the appropriate MIR certificates.

Registering to vote

Register to vote on the testnet with protocol magic id of "1097911063".

• Requires:
  • cardano-cli executable from the cardano-node project
  • jcli executable from the jormungandr project
  • voter-registration executable from this project

cardano-cli address key-gen \
        --verification-key-file payment.vkey \
        --signing-key-file payment.skey
cardano-cli stake-address key-gen \
        --verification-key-file stake.vkey \
        --signing-key-file stake.skey
cardano-cli address build \
        --payment-verification-key-file payment.vkey \
        --out-file payment.addr \
        --testnet-magic 1097911063
cardano-cli stake-address build \
        --stake-verification-key-file stake.vkey \
        --out-file stake.addr \
        --testnet-magic 1097911063
jcli key generate \
        --type ed25519extended \
        > vote.skey
jcli key to-public \
        < vote.skey \
        > vote.pub

CARDANO_NODE_SOCKET_PATH=/run/cardano-node/node.socket voter-registration \
        --payment-signing-key payment.skey \
        --payment-address $(cat payment.addr) \
        --stake-signing-key stake.skey \
        --rewards-address $(cat stake.addr) \
        --vote-public-key vote.pub \
        --testnet-magic 1097911063 \
        --out-file vote-tx.signed \
        --alonzo-era
        --sign
CARDANO_NODE_SOCKET_PATH=/run/cardano-node/node.socket cardano-cli transaction submit \
        --tx-file vote-tx.signed \
        --testnet-magic 1097911063

Running

The latest pre-built statically linked tarball can be found at https://hydra.iohk.io/job/Cardano/voting-tools/native.voterRegistrationTarball.x86_64-linux/latest-finished/download/1/voter-registration.tar.gz

make build-voter-registration

CARDANO_NODE_SOCKET_PATH=state-node-testnet/node.socket \
  ./voter-registration/bin/voter-registration \
  --payment-signing-key payment.skey \
  --stake-signing-key stake.skey \
  --vote-public-key vote.pub \
  --payment-address "addr_test..." \
  --testnet-magic 1097911063 > meta.txsigned

make build-voting-tools

./voting-tools/bin/voting-tools genesis --mainnet --db-user cardano-node --out-file genesis.json

./voting-tools/bin/voting-tools rewards --mainnet --db-user cardano-node --total-rewards 8000 --out-file rewards.json

Development

# Launch a ghcid session for the given target
make dev target=lib:voting-tools
make dev target=exe:voting-tools
make dev target=exe:voter-registration
# Launch a ghci session for the given target
make repl target=lib:voting-tools

Distribution

A static binary for the "voter-registration" executable is provided. Due to limitations in our cross-compilation infrastructure (specifically, static binaries of postgresql libraries cannot be produced), a static binary cannot be provided for the "voting-tools" executable.

The latest static binary can be found here, or built with Nix using:

nix-build -A voterRegistrationTarball