Quickstart

About this guide

This guide is for those interested in getting Namada up and running as quickly as possible. It will guide you through installing Namada, joining a testnet network, running a node, and grabbing some tokens.

Installing Namada

See the installation guide for details on installing the Namada binaries. Commands in this guide will assume you have the Namada binaries (namada, namadan, namadaw, namadac) on your $PATH.

If the binaries are stored somewhere, but are not on your path (perhaps you downloaded the binaries), you can add the binaries to your $PATH with:

export PATH=$PATH:<path-to-namada-binaries>

If you build from source, and run make install, the binaries will be installed to your $PATH by default.

Joining a network

See the networks page for details on how to join a network. The rest of this guide will assume you have joined a network using the namadac utils join-network --chain-id <some-chain-id> command.

Run a ledger node

We recommend this step with tmux (opens in a new tab), which allows the node to keep running without needing the terminal to be open indefinitely. If not, skip to the subsequent step.

tmux
 
# inside the tmux/or not
namadan ledger run
 
# can detach the tmux (Ctrl-B then D)

For a more verbose output, one can run

NAMADA_LOG=info CMT_LOG_LEVEL=p2p:none,pex:error NAMADA_CMT_STDOUT=true namada ledger

This should sync your node to the ledger and will take a while (depending on your machine's hardware as well as the time between genesis and the start of sync). Subsequent commands (generating an account, etc.) are unlikely to work until your node is fully synced. Enquire the current block height with other participants to make sure you are synced in order to proceed.

Generate an account and grab some tokens

First you will need an implicit account in order to receive tokens. You can generate one with:

namadaw gen --alias <your-go-to-alias>

For the remainder of this introduction, let's assume your go-to alias is stanley.

This will generate a new account and store it in the default keychain. You can see the account with:

namadaw list --addr

Grabbing the tokens (testnet only)

Testnet tokens can be sourced from the faucet (opens in a new tab).

From here

From here, you can do a variety of cool things. Perhaps try shielding your NAM, bonding your tokens to a validator for delegating purposes, or becoming a validator.