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Introduction

Welcome!

Welcome to the official scan node guide!

This guide contains the steps and technical recommendations to help you set up your node successfully.

For troubleshooting, please always refer to this documentation and check this guide regularly.

If you have already read this guide before and you are here for troubleshooting, please check the First Asked Questions section to find out quick answers.

For other information including rewards, please check out our node operators page if you have not visited yet.

Please join our #node-support channel on Discord for discussions and the latest announcements!

What is a scan node?

A Forta scan node, or scanner,

  • runs detection bots and feeds them chain data,
  • publishes the alerts generated by the detection bots,
  • generates FORT rewards based on performance (SLA) score.

The scan node software currently does this with the help of two features.

Docker containers

Forta node orchestrates containers of node services and assigned detection bots, manages their lifecycle, limits and networking.

JSON-RPC APIs

Forta node uses a set of JSON-RPC APIs to pull chain data and read on-chain registries. These registries are smart contracts on Polygon Mainnet which know the latest list of bots to run and the latest scanner container version to use.

How is the performance measured?

Forta node sends reports that contain alerts and operational parameters. These outputs are used periodically to measure the quality and performance of a node.

The score calculated as a product of this process is called an SLA score. You can find more about this later on the SLA page.

How to achieve the best performance?

To scan blockchains successfully and generate higher rewards, the scanners need to

  • have enough resources in the host machine,
  • point to high quality JSON-RPC APIs,
  • be able to load the latest list of detection bot assignments,
  • have enough bandwidth available to pull Docker containers and publish alerts,
  • run the latest container version of the software.

Let's start with host machine setup in the next section!