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EOTS Manager

1. Overview​

The EOTS daemon is responsible for managing EOTS keys, producing EOTS randomness, and using them to produce EOTS signatures.

Note: EOTS stands for Extractable One Time Signature. You can read more about it in the Babylon BTC Staking Litepaper. In short, the EOTS manager produces EOTS public/private randomness pairs. The finality provider commits the public part of this pairs to Babylon for every future block height that they intend to provide a finality signature for. If the finality provider votes for two different blocks on the same height, they will have to reuse the same private randomness which will lead to their underlying private key being exposed, leading to the slashing of them and all their delegators.

The EOTS manager is responsible for the following operations:

  1. EOTS Key Management:
    • Generates Schnorr key pairs for a given finality provider using the BIP-340 standard.
    • Persists generated key pairs in the internal Cosmos keyring.
  2. Randomness Generation:
    • Generates lists of EOTS randomness pairs based on the EOTS key, chainID, and block height.
    • The randomness is deterministically generated and tied to specific parameters.
  3. Signature Generation:
    • Signs EOTS using the private key of the finality provider and the corresponding secret randomness for a given chain at a specified height.
    • Signs Schnorr signatures using the private key of the finality provider.

The EOTS manager functions as a daemon controlled by the eotsd tool.

2. Configuration​

The eotsd init command initializes a home directory for the EOTS manager. This directory is created in the default home location or in a location specified by the --home flag.

eotsd init --home /path/to/eotsd/home/

After initialization, the home directory will have the following structure

ls /path/to/eotsd/home/
  ├── eotsd.conf # Eotsd-specific configuration file.
  ├── logs       # Eotsd logs

If the --home flag is not specified, then the default home location will be used. For different operating systems, those are:

  • MacOS ~/Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Eotsd
  • Linux ~/.Eotsd
  • Windows C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Eotsd

3. Starting the EOTS Daemon​

You can start the EOTS daemon using the following command:

eotsd start --home /path/to/eotsd/home

If the --home flag is not specified, then the default home location will be used.

This will start the EOTS rpc server at the address specified in eotsd.conf under the RpcListener field, which is by default set to 127.0.0.1:12582. You can change this value in the configuration file or override this value and specify a custom address using the --rpc-listener flag.

eotsd start

2024-02-08T17:59:11.467212Z info    RPC server listening    {"address": "127.0.0.1:12582"}
2024-02-08T17:59:11.467660Z info    EOTS Manager Daemon is fully active!

All the available cli options can be viewed using the --help flag. These options can also be set in the configuration file.

Note: It is recommended to run the eotsd daemon on a separate machine or network segment to enhance security. This helps isolate the key management functionality and reduces the potential attack surface. You can edit the EOTSManagerAddress in the configuration file of the finality provider to reference the address of the machine where eotsd is running.