Everyone’s specific situation is different, but if you can, it’s a good idea to keep your XAYA wallet running. There are some significant benefits, and some minor costs to doing this. Let’s find out more about them.

FULL NODE

The XAYA wallets available at our Github repository are “full node” wallets. A full node wallet downloads the entire blockchain and relays the blockchain to other nodes.

You can download the full node XAYA Electron wallet here or the full node XAYA QT wallet here.

BENEFITS

By keeping your XAYA wallet running, your wallet is always up-to-date with the blockchain. This means that whenever you want to perform a transaction, you never need to wait for the blockchain to synchronise. For wallets that have not run recently, it can take a fair bit of time to synchronise, taking 10s of minutes or possibly hours. When a blockchain has been around for a longer time, synchronisation can take significantly longer, such as is the case with Bitcoin; it can take several days (or weeks on slower connections) to synchronise the Bitcoin blockchain from scratch.

Another benefit of running a full node (i.e. your wallet software) is that it helps support the XAYA network. Your full node relays blocks to other nodes that in turn can also relay blocks. While this doesn’t provide you with any direct incentive or benefit as this benefit is for the XAYA network, you can feel good knowing that you’re doing a good thing and helping to support the network.

If you remember the old crypto adage, “don’t trust — verify,” then you’ll also likely already know that by running a full node, you aren’t trusting anyone. Full node wallets do full verification; they don’t trust anyone else to do that. This can give you full confidence that everything is as it should be.

COSTS

Running a full node wallet does come at a cost. Depending on your particular situation, you may or may not be prepared for those costs.

The main cost for most people is likely to be bandwidth. Relaying blocks takes some internet bandwidth. If you’re on a slow or bandwidth limited connection, then you may not wish to run a full node. However, for most people this shouldn’t be a worry. If you have an unlimited data transfer connection, then it’s not a worry at all.

The other cost is computing resources for the computer that you’re running the full node wallet on. If you have a very old computer, then this may be a concern. If you have a newer computer, then it’s not going to be a concern. However, if you need to run some extremely resource-intensive software, you may wish to temporarily shut down your wallet and other software while you run that resource-intensive software. This is only going to be an issue on relatively older computers, e.g. an older computer that you use for video rendering (which is a relatively intense operation).

SPV WALLETS

As of this writing, there are no non-full node or SPV XAYA wallets. SPV means “simple payment verification”. SPV wallets don’t download the entire blockchain. Instead, they only connect to a full node, get the headers and perform some simple verifications. For more in-depth information, see here.

Wallets for mobile phones are typical examples of SPV wallets. This type of wallet will be available for XAYA later on.

SUMMARY

By keeping your full node XAYA wallet running all the time, you never need to worry about delays from synchronising your wallet and you can feel good knowing that you’re helping to support the XAYA blockchain network.