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Set up suggested fee recipient

The fee recipient is an Ethereum address that receives transaction fees from block production, separately from the proposer reward that accrues on the beacon chain.

The fee recipient is forwarded to the execution client during block production. Each validator can have its own fee recipient set or a single recipient may be used.

Warning

The execution client is not required to follow the fee recipient suggestion and may instead send the fees to a different address — only use execution clients you trust!

Setting the fee recipient

Nimbus supports setting fee recipient per validator, or using defaults in both the validator client and beacon node.

Per-validator fee recipients are set using the keymanager API.

Any validator without a per-validator recipient set will fall back to the --suggested-fee-recipient option if configured or the withdrawal address of the validator. For each validator, it selects from the first available, in the following order:

  1. The keymanager API per-validator suggested fee recipient
  2. --suggested-fee-recipient in the validator client
  3. --suggested-fee-recipient in the beacon node
  4. If the validator has an associated withdrawal address, it will be used a final fallback option.

Warning

If none of the above are present, the transaction fees are sent to the zero address, effectively causing them to be lost.

For example, nimbus_beacon_node --suggested-fee-recipient=0x70E47C843E0F6ab0991A3189c28F2957eb6d3842 suggests to the execution client that 0x70E47C843E0F6ab0991A3189c28F2957eb6d3842 might be the coinbase. If this Nimbus node has two validators, one of which has its own suggested fee recipient via the keymanager API and the other does not, the former would use its own per-validator suggested fee recipient, while the latter would fall back to 0x70E47C843E0F6ab0991A3189c28F2957eb6d3842.

Fee recipients are recorded publicly on-chain as part of proposed blocks, so suggested fee recipients should allow for this.

Command line

./run-mainnet-beacon-node.sh --suggested-fee-recipient=0x70E47C843E0F6ab0991A3189c28F2957eb6d3842

./run-holesky-beacon-node.sh --suggested-fee-recipient=0x70E47C843E0F6ab0991A3189c28F2957eb6d3842

./nimbus_validator_client --suggested-fee-recipient=0x70E47C843E0F6ab0991A3189c28F2957eb6d3842

Logs

The configured fee recipient for every validator is logged at startup:

NTC 2022-11-10 08:27:02.530+01:00 Local validator attached ...
    initial_fee_recipient=70E47C843E0F6ab0991A3189c28F2957eb6d3842