Stellar Nodes: Watcher or Validator

Learn all about the different nodes type in the Stellar network.

The Stellar network has different types of nodes – watcher nodes, validator nodes, and archiver nodes.

A watcher node is a node that submits transactions to the network. This is similar to a Bitcoin node that broadcasts transactions in the Bitcoin network.

A validator node participates in the voting process to close a ledger. It is similar to a Bitcoin miner that creates new blocks.

An archiver node publishes an archive of the Stellar ledger. This increases the network’s resiliency and helps new nodes catch up with the network.

When subscribing, you can choose which type you would like your node to be.

To run an archiver node, please contact us.

How do I see what version of Stellar Core + Horizon I have deployed?

From the node dashboard in the app, after logging into your dashboard: under the header where it says “Stellar Horizon Mainnet Shared”, there are four fields:

“Horizon Watcher” | “Mainnet” | “stellar-core 13…4a” | “1.5.0-255b12ef9…168”

The last two are the versions of Core and Horizon, respectively, running on the shared node. You can hover over them to get the full display with a hash.

  • Core is v 13.2.0.
  • Horizon is 1.5.0.

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