Hippo Protocol

Hippo Protocol is an application chain built using the Cosmos SDK for medical purposes.

Running testnets with hippod

If you want to spin up a quick testnet with your friends, you can follow these steps. Unless otherwise noted, every step must be done by everyone who wants to participate in this testnet.

1. If you've run hippod before, you may need to reset your genesis file(including gentx) and database before starting a new testnet. You can do with the following command: $ rm -rf .hippo from your Home(or User) directory. If you want to reset only database, just do $ go run hippod/main.go tendermint unsafe-reset-all in root dir.

2. $ go run hippod/main.go init hippo --chain-id hippo-protocol-testnet-1. This will initialize a new working directory at the default location ~/.hippod. You need to provide a "moniker" and a "chain id". These two names are "hippo" and "hippo-protocol-testnet-1" here. If you want to overwrite just genesis file(not including gentx), add --overwrite flag.

3. $ go run hippod/main.go keys add alice. This will create a new key, with a name of your choosing(for here, alice). Save the output of this command somewhere; you'll need the address generated here later.

4. $ go run hippod/main.go genesis add-genesis-account alice 1084734273380000000000000000ahp, where key_name is the same key name as before; and 1084734273380000000000000000ahp is amount.

5. $ go run hippod/main.go genesis gentx alice 1000000000000000000ahp --chain-id hippo-protocol-testnet-1. This will create the genesis transaction for your new chain. Here amount should be at least 1000000000000000000ahp. If you provide too much or too little, you will encounter an error when starting your node.

6. Now, one person needs to create the genesis file genesis.json using the genesis transactions from every participant, by gathering all the genesis transactions under config/gentx and then calling $ go run hippod/main.go genesis collect-gentxs. This will create a new genesis.json file that includes data from all the validators (we sometimes call it the "super genesis file" to distinguish it from single-validator genesis files).

7. Once you've received the super genesis file, overwrite your original genesis.json file with the new super genesis.json.

8. Modify your config/config.toml (in the .hippo working directory) to include the other participants as persistent peers:

   # Comma separated list of nodes to keep persistent connections to
   persistent_peers = "[validator_address]@[ip_address]:[port],[validator_address]@[ip_address]:[port]"
   

   You can find validator_address by running $ go run hippod/main.go tendermint show-node-id. The output will be the hex-encoded validator_address. The default port is 26656.

9. Now you can start your nodes: $ go run hippod/main.go start.

Now you have a hippod testnet that you can use to try out changes to the Cosmos SDK or Tendermint!

NOTE: Sometimes creating the network through the collect-gentxs will fail, and validators will start in a funny state (and then panic). If this happens, you can try to create and start the network first with a single validator and then add additional validators using a create-validator transaction.