__**WARNING:**__ Ethermint is under VERY ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT and should be treated as pre-alpha software. This means it is not meant to be run in production, its APIs are subject to change without warning and should not be relied upon, and it should not be used to hold any value. We will remove this warning when we have a release that is stable, secure, and properly tested.
`ethermint` will be an implementation of the EVM that runs on top of [`tendermint`](https://github.com/tendermint/tendermint) consensus, a Proof of Stake system. This project has as its primary goals:
- [Hard Spoon](https://blog.cosmos.network/introducing-the-hard-spoon-4a9288d3f0df) enablement: This is the ability to take a token from the Ethereum mainnet and "spoon" (shift) the balances over to another network. This feature is intended to make it easy for applications that require more transactions than the Ethereum main chain can provide to move their code over to a compatible chain with much more capacity.
- Web3 Compatibility: In order enable applications to be moved over to an ethermint chain existing tooling (i.e. web3 compatible clients) need to be able to interact with `ethermint`.
The following config steps can be performed all at once by executing the `init.sh` file located in the root directory like this:
```bash
./init.sh
```
> This bash file removes previous blockchain data from `~/.emintd` and `~/.emintcli`. It uses the `keyring-backend` called `test` that should prevent you from needing to enter a passkey. The `keyring-backend` `test` is unsecured and should not be used in production.
To initalize your chain manually, first create a key to use in signing the genesis transaction:
# Run this to ensure everything worked and that the genesis file is setup correctly
emintd validate-genesis
# Start the node (remove the --pruning=nothing flag if historical queries are not needed)
emintd start --pruning=nothing
```
> Note: If you used `make build` instead of make install, and replace all `emintcli` and `emintd` references to `./build/emintcli` and `./build/emintd` respectively
### Starting Ethermint Web3 RPC API
After the daemon is started, run (in another process):
The instructions above include commands to use `test` as the `keyring-backend`. This is an unsecured keyring that doesn't require entering a password and should not be used in production. Otherwise, Ethermint supports using a file or OS keyring backend for key storage. To create and use a file stored key instead of defaulting to the OS keyring, add the flag `--keyring-backend file` to any relevant command and the password prompt will occur through the command line. This can also be saved as a CLI config option with: