Guide to farming on the Subspace Network
Subspace Network is designed to be a massively scalable and distributed infrastructure for Web3, powering the rich experiences across chains. We wanted Subspace to be open and permissionless from day one so that anyone with a laptop could participate in the network from anywhere in the world and get rewarded for their contributions.
Different from many proof-of-work (PoW) or proof-of-stake (PoS) networks, to participate as a Subspace consensus node operator (farmer), you don’t need any specialized hardware or any capital investment. In fact, you won’t need to stake any tokens to run a farmer node either, and any spare computer from the last ten years will likely meet the minimum hardware requirements. Of course, you can also run the node in the background on your laptop without affecting your daily usage.
Recommended Minimum Hardware Requirements
- 2 dedicated CPU cores
- 4GB of RAM
- 50GB of hard drive space
In short, if you can play a game or watch Netflix on your computer, it can most likely also run a node. The farmer node can run natively on macOS, Windows, and Linux operating systems. In addition, some community members were able to run a farmer node on Raspberry Pi, though it is not officially supported (yet).
Reward Composition
There are two sources of rewards in the near term for farmers
- Block Reward — by participating in the consensus and contributing to the network security
- Storage Fee — paid by application developers for permanent on-chain storage (NFT, metaverse, data feeds, etc.)
Getting Started
There are a few options to get your farmer node up and running. We outline them below in order of complexity, based on the level of technical knowledge required.
Desktop Farmer application — GUI (easy)
The GUI is easy to set up and use, like any other application installed on your computer. Link to detailed instructions.
Command Line Interface and Docker (medium)
This path is for technically-savvy users. The nodes have to be configured and managed via CLI. In addition to CLI, we also provide a Docker image to standardize the process across platforms. Link to detailed instructions.
Source code (expert)
If you are an experienced developer and would like to inspect the source code to compile it yourself, here is the link to the Github repository.
The network currently boasts over 20k community-run active nodes, making Subspace one of the most decentralized networks. Thank you for your interest in the Subspace Network, we’d love to have you part of our global community. Don’t forget to join our Discord or Telegram to get the latest updates.
How to Farm was originally published in Subspace Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
