Tao

About Tao

Tao is an innovative solution to the scalability problem with the Ethereum blockchain. Our mission is to be a leading force in building the Internet of Value, and its infrastructure. We are working to create an alternative, scalable financial system which is more secure, transparent, efficient, inclusive, and equitable for everyone.

Tao relies on a system of 150 Masternodes with a Proof of Stake Voting consensus that can support near-zero fee, and 2-second transaction confirmation times. Security, stability, and chain finality are guaranteed via novel techniques such as double validation, staking via smart-contracts, and "true" randomization processes.

Tao supports all EVM-compatible smart-contracts, protocols, and atomic cross-chain token transfers. New scaling techniques such as sharding, private-chain generation, and hardware integration will be continuously researched and incorporated into Tao's masternode architecture. This architecture will be an ideal scalable smart-contract public blockchain for decentralized apps, token issuances, and token integrations for small and big businesses.

More details can be found at our technical white paper

Read more about us on:

• our website: http://tao.network
• our blogs and announcements: https://medium.com/tao
• our documentation portal: https://docs.tao.network

Building the source

Tao provides a client binary called tao for both running a masternode and running a full-node. Building tao requires both a Go (1.7+) and C compiler; install both of these.

Once the dependencies are installed, just run the below commands:

$ git clone https://github.com/Tao-Network/tao2 tao
$ cd tao
$ make tao

Alternatively, you could quickly download our pre-complied binary from our github release page

Running tao

Running a tao masternode

Please refer to the official documentation on how to run a node if your goal is to run a masternode. The recommanded ways of running a node and applying to become a masternode are explained in detail there.

Attaching to the Tao test network

We published our test network 2.0 with full implementation of PoSV consensus at https://stats.testnet.tao.network. If you'd like to experiment with smart contract creation and DApps, you might be interested to give these a try on our Testnet.

In order to connect to one of the masternodes on the Testnet, just run the command below:

$ tao attach https://testnet.tao.network

This will open the JavaScript console and let you query the blockchain directly via RPC.

Running tao locally

Download genesis block

$GENESIS_PATH : location of genesis file you would like to put

export GENESIS_PATH=path/to/genesis.json

• Testnet

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Tao-Network/tao2/master/genesis/testnet.json -o $GENESIS_PATH

• Mainnet

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Tao-Network/tao2/master/genesis/mainnet.json -o $GENESIS_PATH

Create datadir

• create a folder to store tao data on your machine

export DATA_DIR=/path/to/your/data/folder 
mkdir -p $DATA_DIR/tao

Initialize the chain from genesis

tao init $GENESIS_PATH --datadir $DATA_DIR

Initialize / Import accounts for the nodes's keystore

If you already had an existing account, import it. Otherwise, please initialize new accounts

export KEYSTORE_DIR=path/to/keystore

Initialize new accounts

tao account new \
  --password [YOUR_PASSWORD_FILE_TO_LOCK_YOUR_ACCOUNT] \
  --keystore $KEYSTORE_DIR

Import accounts

tao  account import [PRIVATE_KEY_FILE_OF_YOUR_ACCOUNT] \
     --keystore $KEYSTORE_DIR \
     --password [YOUR_PASSWORD_FILE_TO_LOCK_YOUR_ACCOUNT]

List all available accounts in keystore folder

tao account list --datadir ./  --keystore $KEYSTORE_DIR

Start a node

Environment variables

• $IDENTITY: the name of your node
• $PASSWORD: the password file to unlock your account
• $YOUR_COINBASE_ADDRESS: address of your account which generated in the previous step
• $NETWORK_ID: the networkId. Mainnet: 558. Testnet: 559
• $BOOTNODES: The comma separated list of bootnodes. Find them here
• $WS_SECRET: The password to send data to the stats website. Find them here
• $NETSTATS_HOST: The stats website to report to, regarding to your environment. Find them here
• $NETSTATS_PORT: The port used by the stats website (usually 443)

Let's start a node

tao  --syncmode "full" \    
    --datadir $DATA_DIR --networkid $NETWORK_ID --port 20202 \   
    --keystore $KEYSTORE_DIR --password $PASSWORD \    
    --rpc --rpccorsdomain "*" --rpcaddr 0.0.0.0 --rpcport 8545 --rpcvhosts "*" \   
    --rpcapi "db,eth,net,web3,personal,debug" \    
    --gcmode "archive" \   
    --ws --wsaddr 0.0.0.0 --wsport 8546 --wsorigins "*" --unlock "$YOUR_COINBASE_ADDRESS" \   
    --identity $IDENTITY \  
    --mine --gasprice 2500 \  
    --bootnodes $BOOTNODES \   
    --ethstats $IDENTITY:$WS_SECRET@$NETSTATS_HOST:$NETSTATS_PORT 
    console

Some explanations on the flags

--verbosity: log level from 1 to 5. Here we're using 4 for debug messages
--datadir: path to your data directory created above.
--keystore: path to your account's keystore created above.
--identity: your full-node's name.
--password: your account's password.
--networkid: our network ID.
--tao-testnet: required when the networkid is testnet(559).
--port: your full-node's listening port (default to 20202)
--rpc, --rpccorsdomain, --rpcaddr, --rpcport, --rpcvhosts: your full-node will accept RPC requests at 8545 TCP.
--ws, --wsaddr, --wsport, --wsorigins: your full-node will accept Websocket requests at 8546 TCP.
--mine: your full-node wants to register to be a candidate for masternode selection.
--gasprice: Minimal gas price to accept for mining a transaction.
--targetgaslimit: Target gas limit sets the artificial target gas floor for the blocks to mine (default: 4712388)
--bootnode: bootnode information to help to discover other nodes in the network
--gcmode: blockchain garbage collection mode ("full", "archive")
--synmode: blockchain sync mode ("fast", "full", or "light". More detail: https://github.com/Tao-Network/tao2/blob/master/eth/downloader/modes.go#L24)           
--ethstats: send data to stats website

To see all flags usage

tao --help

See your node on stats page

• Testnet: https://stats.testnet.tao.network
• Mainnet: http://stats.tao.network

Contributing and technical discussion

Thank you for considering to try out our network and/or help out with the source code. We would love to get your help; feel free to lend a hand. Even the smallest bit of code, bug reporting, or just discussing ideas are highly appreciated.

If you would like to contribute to the tao source code, please refer to our Developer Guide for details on configuring development environment, managing dependencies, compiling, testing and submitting your code changes to our repo.

Please also make sure your contributions adhere to the base coding guidelines:

• Code must adhere to official Go formatting guidelines (i.e uses gofmt).
• Code comments must adhere to the official Go commentary guidelines.
• Pull requests need to be based on and opened against the master branch.
• Any code you are trying to contribute must be well-explained as an issue on our github issue page
• Commit messages should be short but clear enough and should refer to the corresponding pre-logged issue mentioned above.

For technical discussion, feel free to join our chat at Gitter.