Republic Protocol, a decentralized dark pool exchange protocol for trading large volumes of digital assets, this week announced the release of its Darknodes to the public.

From this point onward, there will be no restrictions for the deployment of a Darknode, meaning anyone with 100k REN will be able to deploy one on the mainnet.

While anyone can launch a Darknode, this does not guarantee profitability or the ability to cover operating costs. If current network activity does not cover the operating costs of running a Darknode, individuals will be notified through the Darknode Command Center prior to final deployment.

Darknode Participation Guidelines

Republic Protocol strongly encourages those who set up Darknodes to follow these guidelines so that the protocol can maximize community participation and benefit:

Only run one (1) Darknode per participant.

Setup the Darknode using the default configurations and do not disable auto-updates.

Assist in ongoing testing and provision of feedback for Darknode operation.

Notify the team if terminating a Darknode.

The Republic Protocol team said, “As a permissionless decentralized protocol, users are not bound by these guidelines, but they will greatly help the project’s progression and community involvement as it transitions to an openly run network.”

Darknode Deployment Instructions

Initially, Republic Protocol (REN) will only be supporting Darknode deployment on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Digital Ocean (DO). The official set of instructions can be found on ZenDesk. The team will continue to bring support for other cloud providers, but does not recommend running a Darknode on a personal computer due to the uptime and network requirements.

The team will also be providing direct support to the core community members first (Ren Ambassadors and Testnet Darknode Operators), ensuring they have the resources needed to assist the broader public with the Darknode onboarding procedure and troubleshooting.

These community members will assist with onboarding through Republic’s Telegram channel and have experience running testnet Darknodes, while supporting the team. Republic will prioritize this user base to ensure that the initial set of Darknodes are reliably operated and that valuable feedback can be obtained at an early stage.