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Buying Tickets With exccwallet

Last updated for CLI release v1.7.2.

This guide provides step-by-step instructions for buying tickets using exccwallet. Prior to starting, it is recommended to decide whether to solo vote or use a Voting Service Provider (VSP). For more information on the pros and cons of each approach, please refer to the How to Stake page.

Prerequisites:

  • Use the latest exccinstall to install exccd, exccwallet, and exccctl. Additional steps will be required if another installation method was used.
  • Review how the launch commands for the Command Prompt (Windows) and Bash (macOS/Linux) shells differ here.
  • Setup exccd and have it running in the background.
  • Setup exccwallet and have it running in the background.
  • Familiarize yourself with the basics of using exccctl.
  • You should also be familiar with the staking process and the ticket lifecycle

Please note that this guide assumes you have set up exccd and exccwallet using configuration files. If you used exccinstall, you already have configuration files. Using configuration files is highly recommended as it makes it easier to issue commands to exccwallet and exccd through exccctl. For instructions on minimum configuration (saving your RPC username and RPC password), please see here.

Step 1. Enable Voting

Solo-voting

Warning

Solo-voting with a voting wallet that doesn’t stay online 24/7 may result in missed votes and forfeited stake rewards.

To solo-vote, you simply set the enablevoting option when starting exccwallet, unlock the wallet with your private passphrase, and buy tickets. With enablevoting enabled and exccwallet unlocked, your wallet will automatically handle voting.

To set up your exccwallet for solo-staking, add the following line to your exccwallet.conf config file:

enablevoting=1

Once exccwallet is restarted with that line in exccwallet.conf, your wallet will be configured for solo-voting and you can start purchasing tickets.

VSP Voting

You can find a list of VSPs here.

Once you have decided on a VSP, delegating voting to a VSP for purchased tickets is accomplished with the following configuration options set in your exccwallet.conf file.

  • vsp.url
  • vsp.pubkey
; ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
; VSP settings
; ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

; The URL of the VSP.
vsp.url=https://testnet-vsp.excc.co

; The base64 encoded public key of the VSP server.  This can be found on the
; VSP website in the footer.
vsp.pubkey=QrYmJzCOiFE/rHGUgykpGs8UQHSUzEVOFYcAIt23cfY=

Step 2. Purchase Tickets

There are two ways to purchase tickets: manual or automatic. Manual ticket buying provides more control over the purchasing process, allowing you to choose when to purchase tickets, how much to pay for each ticket, and how often to unlock the purchasing wallet. The automatic ticket buyer, on the other hand, is more convenient and requires less maintenance, but it requires the purchasing wallet to remain online continuously.

Both manual and automatic ticket purchasing require your wallet to be unlocked.

Tip

To find the current ticket price, issue the exccctl --wallet getstakeinfo command and look for the difficulty value. This is the price of each ticket in the current price window. You will want to adjust your spendlimit argument in the purchaseticket command to be greater than this difficulty value when purchasing tickets manually.

Manual Ticket Purchase

The purchaseticket RPC command allows you to attempt purchasing a ticket using available funds. It requires two parameters to function:

  1. fromaccount - A string specifying the account to purchase tickets from, such as “default”.
  2. spendlimit - A number specifying the limit on the amount to spend on a ticket, such as 50.

More advanced parameters can be listed with the command exccctl --wallet help purchaseticket. If the purchaseticket command is successful it will output the hash of the purchased ticket.

$ exccctl --testnet --wallet purchaseticket default 100
[
  "69b855e0d318dc5a21ff0f2717ad149b324027a1e46ecd28d0a18ea1ca249f5b"
]

The ticket has now entered the mempool and begins the ticket lifecycle.

For solo voters the process is complete. If they are using separate ticket buying and voting wallets, the ticket buying wallet can now be closed.

For VSP users, after purchasing the ticket, they need to keep their wallet open for a few moments to allow the VSP to register the newly purchased ticket and pay the fee. The exccwallet log will display a “successfully processed” message once the registration is complete. At this point, the ticket buying wallet can be closed.

[INF] WLLT: Published ticket purchase 69b855e0d318dc5a21ff0f2717ad149b324027a1e46ecd28d0a18ea1ca249f5b
[INF] VSPC: VSP requires fee 0.00010829 EXCC
[INF] VSPC: successfully processed 69b855e0d318dc5a21ff0f2717ad149b324027a1e46ecd28d0a18ea1ca249f5b

Automatic Ticketbuyer

exccwallet includes a built-in ticketbuyer which can buy tickets for you automatically. It can be enabled by adding the following line to your exccwallet.conf config file:

enableticketbuyer=1

If you don’t want ticketbuyer to spend all of your funds, there is one more option which allows you to specify a balance which will not be spent:

ticketbuyer.balancetomaintainabsolute=<balance>