Run election algorithms of substrate (all under sp-npos-elections) offline.

Substrate seminar about offchain phragmen and how the staking pallet works in substrate. youtube.com/watch?v=MjOvVhc1oXw.

Substrate seminar session about this repo prior to the overhaul (offline-phragmen): youtube.com/watch?v=6omrrY11HEg

Sub0 Talk about offchain phragmen: crowdcast.io/e/sub0-online/7 / youtube.com/watch?v=H9OvpAOebTs

Several tools have already built on top of this repo, such:

• https://polkadot.pro/phragmen.php
• https://polkadot.staking4all.org/

Note that the npos results generate by this repo or any of the above tools will not be exactly equal to that of polkadot and kusama. This is highly dependent on the arguments passed to the staking sub-command. The NPoS solution of both polkadot and kusama is being computed in a non-deterministic way.

As of this writing, the validator election of Polkadot/Kusama is as such: seq-phragmen -> random iterations of balancing -> reduce. This translates to:

cargo run -- staking -i 10 -r

And if executed at the correct time (i.e. while the election window is open), this should accurately predict the next validator set, but the nominator stake distribution will be different, because the random number of iterations is not known.

Simply run --help.

Offline elections app.

Provides utilities and debug tools around the election pallets of a substrate chain offline.

Can be used to predict next elections, diagnose previous ones, and perform checks on validators and nominators.

USAGE:
    offline-election [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] <SUBCOMMAND>

FLAGS:
    -h, --help
            Prints help information

    -V, --version
            Prints version information

    -v
            Print more output


OPTIONS:
        --at <at>
            The block number at which the scrap should happen. Use only the hex value, no need for a `0x` prefix

    -n, --network <network>
            Network address format. Can be kusama|polkadot|substrate.

            This will also change the token display name. [default: polkadot]
        --uri <uri>
            The node to connect to [default: ws://localhost:9944]


SUBCOMMANDS:
    command-center         Display the command center of the staking panel
    council                Run the council election
    current                Display the current validators
    dangling-nominators    Show the nominators who are dangling:
    help                   Prints this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)
    next                   Display the next queued validators
    nominator-check        The general checkup of a nominator
    staking                Run the staking election
    validator-check        The general checkup of a validators

You can override voters and candidates in both staking and council election py passing a -m or --manual-override flag. This must point to a json file that contains the following keys:

1. voters: the new voters to be added.
2. candidates: the new candidates to be added.
3. voters_remove: voters to be removed.
4. candidates_remove: candidates to be removed.

Note that first the incomings are added, and then any voter/candidate in the outgoing list is stripped out.

Find an example here.

• Run the council election with 25 members.

RUST_LOG=offline-phragmen=trace cargo run -- council --count 25

• Run the staking election with no equalization at a particular block number

cargo run --at 8b7d6e14221b4fefc4b007660c80af6d4a9ac740c50b6e918f61d521553cd17e staking

• Run the election with only 50 slots, and print all the nominator distributions

cargo run -- -vv staking --count 50

• Run the above again now with reduce() and see how most nominator edges are... reduced.

cargo run -- -vv staking --count 50 --reduce

• Run the above again now against a remote node.

cargo run -- --uri wss://kusama-rpc.polkadot.io/ -vv staking --count 50 --reduce

Both Polkadot and Kusama are growing fast and scraping the data is becoming harder and harder. I > really recommend you to try this script against a local node, or be prepared to wait for a while.

By default it will attempt to connect to a locally running node running at ws://127.0.0.1:9944.

Connect to a different node using the --uri argument e.g. --uri wss://kusama-rpc.polkadot.io/.

• ws:// prefix: plain (unencrypted) websockets connection.
• wss:// prefix: TLS (encrypted) websockets connection.

Scripts output additional information as logs. You need to enable them by setting RUST_LOG environment variable.

Also, you can always use -v, -vv, ... to get more output out of each script.