A Sophon Full Node is a complete node that stores a full copy of the blockchain and can serve as either a sequencer or a validator.

  • During the initial phase of the network, only one node, operated by Sophon Labs, is authorized to submit batches.
  • However, efforts are underway to allow multiple nodes to collaborate through a consensus mechanism, adhering to the relevant network criteria, which will further decentralize block creation.

At present, you can only run a read-only version of the Full Node. The full size of the database at the time of writing is ~1.3TB.

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High-level Overview

At a high level, the Full Node consists of the following modules:

  • API Server: Provides the publicly available Web3 interface
  • Synchronization Layer: Interacts with the main node and retrieves transactions and blocks to re-execute
  • Sequencer Component: Executes and persists transactions received from the synchronization layer
  • Checker Modules: Ensure the consistency of the ZKsync node state

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Capabilities and Limitations

With the Full Node, you can:

  • Locally recreate and verify the Sophon mainnet/testnet state
  • Interact with the recreated state in a trustless way
  • Use the Web3 API without querying the main node
  • Send L2 transactions (proxied to the main node)

However, the Full Node cannot:

  • Create L2 blocks or L1 batches independently
  • Generate proofs
  • Submit data to L1

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Running a Full Node

The process of running a Full Node on Sophon is identical to running one on ZKsync Era, with the addition of the Avail Data Availability layer. Clone and follow our configuration repository to set up your own full node. It can be initialized in two modes:

  • Recovery from DB dumps
  • Syncing fully from genesis

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How to set up your avail credentials

In order to be able to configure your node with your own Avail DA, you first need to create an Avail DA account. Please check the instructions from the Avail DA user guide.

To start your Sophon node from database dumps, you need to enable recovery from snapshots and specify the snapshot location:

EN_SNAPSHOTS_RECOVERY_ENABLED: "false"
EN_SNAPSHOTS_OBJECT_STORE_BUCKET_BASE_URL: "raas-sophon-mainnet-external-node-snapshots"

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Start your node from genesis

To start your Sophon node from genesis, you need to disable recovery from snapshots:

EN_SNAPSHOTS_RECOVERY_ENABLED: "false"

This is not recommended unless necessary for your use case, as it takes multiple days to sync.

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Local Testing

Following our configuration repository you can opt to start a local node via Docker Compose. For this, we provide you a start script that cleans up all Docker artifacts once you exit the process in the terminal (with ctrl+C).

For an even simpler local testing experience, we recommend setting up an in-memory node and forking mainnet using the ZKsync CLI.

For detailed info on how to run, configure, and maintain a Full Node, see ZKsync’s docs. However, for most of the cases, following our configuration repository should be enough.

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