Operators
Every distributed application needs peers that are there when the others aren’t. Edge Nodes are how that happens — and they’re run by people, on their own hardware, not by us.
What an operator does
In a peer-to-peer application, two people have to be online at once for data to sync. If someone adds something and closes their laptop before anyone else opens theirs, the group falls out of step. An always-on node fixes that by simply being there — holding a copy of the data, relaying it to whoever appears next, and taking validation load off everyone’s devices.
One node makes a group reliable. Enough nodes, in enough places, make the network reliable.
What you need
A HoloPort, an old laptop, a VPS, or any machine you can leave running with a wired connection. For Wind Tunnel testing: 10GB disk, 8GB RAM.
Any Linux distribution that runs OCI containers.
Comfort with a terminal. If you can SSH into a machine and run a Docker command, you can run a node.
No account, no contract, no conversation with us required. The tooling is open source under CAL 1.0.
Two ways to run
01 · Always-on node
Join a Moss group and keep its tools available around the clock. The node checks for new tools every five minutes and installs them itself.
Best if you’re already using peer-to-peer tools with a group and want them to work properly.
Read the always-on guide →02 · Wind Tunnel runner
Put your node into the Holochain Foundation’s testing cluster, where it runs real stress scenarios against clusters of conductors at scale.
Best if you want your hardware to make Holochain more robust rather than serve a particular group. Needs a dedicated machine.
Read the Wind Tunnel guide →What operators earn
HoloFuel is the accounting currency of the hosting network, and operators are credited for the capacity they provide. Run a node, hold data, serve requests, take validation load — that gets accounted for and it gets credited to you.
HoloFuel hasn’t launched yet. When it does, settlement runs automatically through Unyt: your node logs what it did, and the accounting happens without you invoicing anyone. Progress is on the roadmap, and we’ll say more as it gets closer.
Nodes running today are building the capacity that earns.
Get started
Both guides are written for someone who has never done this before. If you get stuck, the operator forum and the Holochain Discord are where the people who’ve already done it are.