Onboarding a New Miner or Sharder

This page describes how new miners/sharders join the Züs network.

When new miners wants to join the Züs set of miners, they begin by getting the newest magic block using the 0DNS protocol. The magic block is defined as the block from the last view change round: it thus specifies the latest active set of miners and sharders for the network. 0DNS is a centralized entity that gets the magic blocks from the sharders, links them back to the genesis block, and posts the latest set of miners and sharders for the blockchain so that clients can interact with them easily

From the magic block, we get the set of current sharders. The miner then requests the state (which of the 5 phases) of the view change from the sharders. These stages are discussed in more detail in View Change and Distributed Key Generation.

The new miner sends a transaction to the blockchain staking tokens and requesting to be added to the list of available miners. Once that transaction is accepted, the miner listens to the sharders for when it is included in the list of incoming miners in the contribute phase of a view change. See View Change and Distributed Key Generation for more details on this process.

Similarly, a new sharder gets the latest magic block and waits until it is selected in a view change round. Once selected, they request the blocks that they need to store from the other sharders.