Migrating to Anchor

Anchor is designed to be interoperable with the go-ssv's key formats. This means the process of migrating from go-ssv to Anchor is fairly straight forward. We simply need to move the operator key from the go-ssv directory into the Anchor data directory.

Precautions

There are a host of issues that can arise if two identical operators are running at the same time. It is important to stop the go-ssv node before running the Anchor node. For safety, we strongly recommend moving the keys rather than copying them, to prevent multiple instances of the same operator id running at the same time.

Moving to Anchor

Firstly, ensure Anchor is installed and working by following the steps in Installation. To check, ensure the expected version of Anchor can be run:

anchor --version

The next step to move the operator key from the go-ssv node to Anchor. By default, go-ssv stores the operator encrypted private key at:

~/ssv-stack/ssv-node-data/encrypted_private_key.json

By default, Anchor expects the operator key in the path:

~/.anchor/<network>/encrypted_private_key.json

Here <network> represents the network the operator is going to run on, for example hoodi or mainnet.

To migrate from go-ssv to Anchor, we simply need to move the operator private key. If using the default values, for mainnet, this would look like:

mv ~/ssv-stack/ssv-node-data/encrypted_private_key.json ~/.anchor/mainnet/encrypted_private_key.json

Once this key is moved, Anchor should be able to be run. See the Node CLI Reference for a list of CLI parameters required to fully run the Anchor node as an operator.

You will need to put the password that decrypts the operator key into a file and reference it in Anchor's CLI via the --password-file <PATH> parameter.