Host your Astar RPC Node via the Flux Marketplace

Flux Official
6 min readApr 17, 2023

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Flux — The Web3 Cloud

Flux’s core values and ethos center around the rise of Web 3.0 — By, and For the People. Its aim is to evoke the power of corporations and restore it to the common people. The Flux Cloud is decentralized, based on thousands of single servers from all over the world that are all connected in one operating system. Individuals are the backbone of technology, so to speak. They provide the cloud with computational resources via home-based bare metal machines or rented servers and are incentivized by 50% of the total block reward.

To this date, the decentralized cloud of Flux is supported by over 14,000 nodes around the globe. Its total available computational resources amount to around 110,000 Cores, 300 TB of RAM, and over 7 PT (Petabytes) of SSD. It is a Web 3.0 cloud powerhouse that can be used to deploy applications in a decentralized and censor-resistant manner. There are plenty of advantages to using Flux instead of traditional Web2 infrastructure providers:

  • All applications are redundant and have automatic failovers in case of any outages.
  • The Flux Cloud is agnostic to code language as it uses Docker Hub containers as an on-ramp.
  • The Flux Cloud automatically keeps applications up to date with the respective container.
  • The Flux Cloud offers competitive pricing.

Astar — The Gateway in the Multichain Era

Astar network provides the infrastructure for building dApps with EVM and Wasm smart contracts offering developers true interoperability with cross-consensus messaging (XCM) and a cross-virtual machine (XVM). Astar’s unique Build2Earn model empowers developers to get paid through a dApp staking mechanism for the code they write and dApps they build.

Enough introduction! Let us go ahead with the guide on how to deploy your very own Astar RPC Node via the Flux Marketplace in very few steps!

  1. We first need to head over to https://home.runonflux.io/
  2. Once here, we need to log in using our ZelID. Available for us via Zelcore https://zelcore.io/ (Remember to use always the official links)

2.1 If you do not have an account created in Zelcore, you first need to download and install the app

2.2 Next (mandatory for your wallet’s safety), enable d2FA on the App section inside Zelcore.

2.3 Now you can authenticate by clicking on the fingerprint button or manually by signing the message manually on your Zelcore Wallet with the ZelID App

3. Now that you have been authenticated, head over to https://home.runonflux.io/apps/marketplace and look for the AstarRPC Application — You will find it under the ‘RPC Node’ category. You will see something remarkably like this:

4. Click on “Start Launching Marketplace App.”, you get something like:

5. You can click “Next” or copy the Registration Message if you want to sign the message manually using your ZelID App, and then click “Next.”

6. Here, you can click the fingerprint button to sign the request for the application. If you have done this manually, paste the signed message from the earlier step onto your ZelID.

7. You will now see the monthly cost for your application. Click on “Register Flux App.”

8. You will be given payment information in FLUX. Payment is made through the FLUX blockchain using FLUX coins.

9. Select “Pay with Zelcore” to make the payment for the application.

10. You’re done! We now need to wait for your Astar RPC Node to be spawned on an available node, which usually takes around 10–30 minutes

Usage of the Astar RPC Node

When you’re logged in with your ZelID at https://home.runonflux.io, go to the “Global Apps” menu tab on the left-hand side. From there, go to the “My Apps” tab, where you can manage and visit your Astar RPC Node deployments. Click on the arrow pointing down to see your application specifications and the IPs running it.

More importantly, you see your “Automatic Domains” which were generated by the Flux-Domain-Manager (FDM). You’ll need the first one listed there, in our case astarrpc.app.runonflux.io. This HTTPS endpoint is load balancing between your three Astar RPC Nodes (If they are synced 100%)

https://astarrpc.app.runonflux.io

As you can see, your Astar RPC Node is redundant, which means it is always running on a minimum of three instances simultaneously. That means you could use each individual IP as an RPC endpoint as well. Click on “Visit App” to get to its HTTP endpoint. Examples:

http://178.211.139.3:36011/
http://142.161.69.177:36011/

You can check the logs of the individual IPs to ensure that the Node is syncing properly.

  1. Visit one IP by clicking on “Visit FluxNode”
  2. Log in with your ZelID
  3. Navigate to “Apps”, “Local Apps”, “My Local Apps”
  4. Click “Manage”, “Manage App”, “Log File”

You should see something similar like this (The RPC Node is syncing):

L2023–03–31 15:04:30 [Relaychain] Imported #14886772 (0x496a6ebd)
L2023–03–31 15:04:30 [Relaychain] Imported #14886772 (0x53a33110)
J2023–03–31 15:04:31 [Parachain] Imported #3253416 (0x26fd249f)
J2023–03–31 15:04:31 [Parachain] Imported #3253416 (0xd06b9f31)
2023–03–31 15:04:34 [Relaychain] Idle (40 peers), best: #14886772 (0x496a6ebd), finalized #14886770 (0x0a1c9b32), 295.5kiB/s 403.8kiB/s
2023–03–31 15:04:34 [Parachain] Idle (28 peers), best: #3253415 (0xf7ba70d5), finalized #3253414 (0x0bf15e66), 34.6kiB/s 10.7kiB/s
L2023–03–31 15:04:36 [Relaychain] Imported #14886773 (0xf0af8190)
2023–03–31 15:04:39 [Relaychain] Idle (40 peers), best: #14886773 (0xf0af8190), finalized #14886770 (0x0a1c9b32), 151.9kiB/s 148.6kiB/s
2023–03–31 15:04:39 [Parachain] Idle (32 peers), best: #3253415 (0xf7ba70d5), finalized #3253414 (0x0bf15e66), 11.2kiB/s 11.6kiB/s
L2023–03–31 15:04:42 [Relaychain] Imported #14886774 (0xc6b07f74)
J2023–03–31 15:04:43 [Parachain] Imported #3253417 (0xae5c833a)
2023–03–31 15:04:44 [Relaychain] Idle (40 peers), best: #14886774 (0xc6b07f74), finalized #14886771 (0x390534cb), 157.2kiB/s 248.7kiB/s
2023–03–31 15:04:44 [Parachain] Idle (27 peers), best: #3253416 (0x26fd249f), finalized #3253414 (0x0bf15e66), 21.5kiB/s 24.1kiB/s
L2023–03–31 15:04:48 [Relaychain] Imported #14886775 (0x8f78cc31)
2023–03–31 15:04:49 [Relaychain] Idle (40 peers), best: #14886775 (0x8f78cc31), finalized #14886772 (0x496a6ebd), 212.4kiB/s 253.1kiB/s
2023–03–31 15:04:49 [Parachain] Idle (30 peers), best: #3253416 (0x26fd249f), finalized #3253415 (0xf7ba70d5), 4.0kiB/s 4.2kiB/s

Remember, your Astar RPC Node is only subscribed for 22,000 Flux blocks initially, which is ~ 44,000 minutes (about 1 month). You will need to renew payment after the first month, so your Node does not get kicked off the network. We give you the choice to renew it for a longer term after the first deployment for up to one whole year.

  1. Visit https://home.runonflux.io/ and log in with your ZelID
  2. Navigate to “Apps”, “Global Apps”, “My Apps”
  3. Click “Manage”, “Manage App”, “Update Specifications”
  4. Leave all the variables like they are, except the PERIOD field — Adjust it to your preference. Next, click on “Compute Update Message”
  5. Sign the Message with the ZelID App and click “Update Flux App” after
  6. Click “Pay with Zelcore” to make the Flux Payment
  7. Voilà your Node has been renewed for your chosen duration

Have Fun supporting the Astar Blockchain with decentralized infrastructure!

Learn more about Flux at www.runonflux.io
Learn more about Astar at https://astar.network/

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