GV Gnosis Validator

The Gnosis Validator is a small computer in Jamie’s house that helps run Gnosis Chain. On it are thirty-two validators, each one taking its turn to attest to the chain and, now and then, to propose a block.

On September 3, 2022 he ordered a Dappnode Home i732, a mini PC sold ready to run a node, and said why Gnosis: “I’m a big fan of POAP and Nifty.ink, both of which run on Gnosis. This seems like the easiest path exploring home staking.” Six days later it was syncing, and he found it “relatively easy to get setup.”

The first four validators went live on September 14. That night he added four more, and one of them proposed block 4,830,917. A week later they made five proposals in a day: “New high.” On September 29 he claimed and staked four GNO from a Dappnode promotion, which brought him to twenty. By October 1, 2022 the chain counted all thirty-two.

Then it ran. In September 2025 he checked in on it and found it had been up for a year and twenty-eight weeks, with four packages waiting for updates. A couple of reboots later everything was current, “never needing to do anything other than use the web browser.” His note to himself: “I’ll try not to wait over a year to do the manual updates next.”

It ran until spring 2026. Around May 10 the validators stopped attesting, and nobody noticed for six months. When Jamie looked on November 12, the consensus client, Teku, was restarting in a loop: its database had grown to 596 GB, and it had been down so long that it refused to pick up where it left off, outside what the chain calls the weak subjectivity period. All thirty-two were still active and none had been slashed. An offline validator only gives up a little of its stake each epoch, but six months of epochs add up. He cleared Teku’s data and had it start over from a recent checkpoint. That took a second try, because the checkpoint server Dappnode sets up answered with a redirect Teku would not follow; Gnosis’s own server worked. Teku was synced that evening, and the execution client, Nethermind, set to work on six months of blocks. Since then a check reads the validators from the chain every morning, so the next silence will be a short one.

One detail from the workbench: the screenshots from the first night and the one in 2025 show different consensus clients, Prysm in 2022 and Teku by 2025. The box changed what it ran on the inside while the validators kept their numbers.