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Integration

A guide for helping developers from exchanges/pools/etc integrate Ergo.

Any suggestions for improvements are welcomed!

Please send them to [email protected] or join us on #development on Discord.

Getting Started

Some quick facts about Ergo that are useful to know.

  • like Bitcoin, a transaction in Ergo has multiple inputs and outputs. Unspent outputs are single-use entities. However, Ergo is built from scratch; thus, scripts and transaction formats are different.
  • Just like Bitcoin, there are some standard scripts in Ergo associated with addresses, e.g. P2PK addresses. Read more here on the address scheme
  • Ergo has an inbuilt wallet API which is enough for most use-cases. API has a Swagger interface on 127.0.0.1:9053 by default in the mainnet (9052 on testnet).
  • See the full guide on setting How to set up a node and the associated troubleshooting page.

Node Wallet

Main methods:

  • /wallet/init to create a wallet (and a secret mnemonic)
  • /wallet/restore to restore a wallet from mnemonic
  • /wallet/unlock to unlock the wallet (it is unlocked after init but locked after restart). You have to unlock it before signing transactions
  • /wallet/lock to lock the wallet
  • /wallet/payment/send to send a simple payment
  • /wallet/status to get wallet status
  • /wallet/deriveNextKey to derive a new key according to EIP-3 (BIP 44 implementation for Ergo)
  • /wallet/balances to get wallet balance (for all the addresses)
  • /wallet/transactions to get wallet transactions (for all the addresses)

Creating an external wallet.

If you plan to perform your wallet logic externally, you can do so with a library and the block explorer.

Please note, you will need to consider mempool transactions to avoid double-spending generation.

Available libraries are:

Offline Signing

Address generation

To generate new addresses in the same wallet you can use the /wallet/deriveNextKey API method

curl -X GET "http://localhost:9053/wallet/deriveNextKey" -H  "accept: application/json" -H  "api_key: hello"

Composing transactions outside the node

To get unspent UTXOs for some address, please use transactions/boxes/byAddress/unspent Explorer API method: 

https://api.ergoplatform.com/transactions/boxes/byAddress/unspent/9gAE5e454UT5s3NB1625u1LynQYPS2XzzBEK4xumvSZdqnXT35M

You need to exclude UTXOs spent in the mempool. Use /transactions/unconfirmed/byAddress Explorer API method for that:

https://api.ergoplatform.com/transactions/unconfirmed/byAddress/9gAE5e454UT5s3NB1625u1LynQYPS2XzzBEK4xumvSZdqnXT35M

Broadcasting transaction

To broadcast a transaction made outside the node, the easiest way is to serialize it into JSON; in Java, it could be like:

Json json = JsonCodecsWrapper.ergoLikeTransactionEncoder().apply(tx);
System.out.println(json.toString());

and then send this JSON via a POST request to the public Explorer 

https://api.ergoplatform.com/api/v0/transactions/send*

your private Explorer or a node with open API (POST to http://{node_ip}:9053/transactions )

Infrastructure

Explorer

There is a public explorer hosted at explorer.ergoplatform.com

You can use ergo-bootstrap to easily install the Explorer backend (and not rely on public ones).

Testnet

See this page for information on the public testnets.

To start your testnet, use the following testnet.conf:

ergo {
  networkType = "testnet"

  node {
    mining = true
    offlineGeneration = true
    useExternalMiner = false
  }
}

scorex {

 network {
    bindAddress = "0.0.0.0:9020"
    nodeName = "ergo-testnet-4.0.23"
    #knownPeers = []
  }

 restApi {
    # Hex-encoded Blake2b256 hash of an API key. Should be 64-chars long Base16 string.
    # Below is hash corresponding to API_KEY = "hello" (with no quotes)
    apiKeyHash = "324dcf027dd4a30a932c441f365a25e86b173defa4b8e58948253471b81b72cf"
  }
}

Then your node will CPU-mine its chain.

Troubleshooting

Dust Collection

Please consider collecting deposits dust from miners periodically (who create a lot of small UTXOs).

Ergo is based on the extended-UTXO model. A side-effect of UTXOs is a term coined dust. Dust refers to fractional values of ERG and is usually below the protocol fee, miner wallets are prone to becoming dusty with the stream of rewards coming into their wallet. All these excess UTXOs can cause a slowdown and ultimately, make impact your nodes functionability. This is important to set-up for large exchanges who will recieve a lot of mining traffic. You need to collect dust aggressively, new dust arrives all the time for miners

To solve

  • Get utxos from /wallet/boxes/unspent with min number of confirmations
  • Get their ids and total sum
  • Get their binary representations of utxos via /utxo/byIdBinary/{boxId}

Finally, construct the payment transaction like:

{
  "requests": [
    {
      "address": "3WwbzW6u8hKWBcL1W7kNVMr25s2UHfSBnYtwSHvrRQt7DdPuoXrt",
      "value": 10000000000
    }
  ],
  "fee": 1000000,
  "inputsRaw": [
    "utxo1", "utxo2"
  ],
  "dataInputsRaw": [
  ]
}

and post to /wallet/transaction/send

Set value and fee accordingly, value + fee = total sum of utxos

You can query with specific parameters like this, 

curl -X GET "http://127.0.0.1:9053/wallet/boxes/unspent?minConfirmations=10&minInclusionHeight=0" -H  "accept: application/json" -H  "api_key: hello"

Another (and simple) way to collect is to set 

ergo {
 wallet {
   maxInputs = 300 
   optimalInputs = 100
 }
}

and send 1 ERG to the change address, however, the node will attach 100 dust inputs (so send any large amounts of change to the change address as well)

Failed to sign boxes

This error can occur as a result of too many inputs being collected in a transaction for dusty wallets. 

Failed to sign boxes due to Estimated execution cost 1001580 exceeds the limit 1000000: Vector(ErgoBox(0275eb3a125bc02fe997cb98c0de8131bd9b2e4617110d

Native Asssets

In the case of large airdrops, many users mistakenly end up putting exchange addresses to receive native assets. An auto-burn method will be in future versions of the node to reduce the manual component of this task. See this Issue for more information.

Send the following request via /wallet/payment/send, replacing the tokenId with the IDs from the tokens spamming your wallets. 

[
  {
    "address": "4MQyMKvMbnCJG3aJ",
    "value": 100000000,
    "assets": [
      {"tokenId":"e55adbda4e42f2bd21b1cb9498c105ff3bc1069012942d6158412f55759369c3","amount":1},
      {"tokenId":"6dd3e0ac4edd9702094aa4e3cad7c0c73d5437292c11805adf5d5068312748b4","amount":1}
    ]
  }
]

Tokens with Value

  • SigUSD ($1): 472c3d4ecaa08fb7392ff041ee2e6af75f4a558810a74b28600549d5392810e8
  • SigRSV
  • ergopad
  • NETA
  • LunaDog
  • Erdoge