FREE · NO ACCOUNT · FOR ANY BTX NODE

Node Guardian

Node Guardian is a free script you install on the machine your BTX node already runs on. It watches that node, tells a network that is waiting apart from a node that is stuck, and dials the peers that fix the second one. It never restarts your node.

Your node should never get quietly stuck. And when it stops, you deserve the truth about why.

Install it Read the research

THE SAME SYMPTOM, TWO OPPOSITE PROBLEMS

NOTHING IS WRONG

blocks behind the signed frontier

The network has signed nothing newer. Every node that follows signatures is waiting with you. There is nothing to fetch, and restarting will not produce a block that does not exist yet.

Guardian does nothing, and says so.

YOUR NODE IS BEHIND

blocks behind the signed frontier

Signed history exists that you have not collected. Left alone this does not heal, and it is the state that costs operators hours or days without anyone noticing.

Guardian dials the archive peers that fix it.

Both nodes show a still height. Both write the same warning to the log, once a minute, forever. One number separates them, and your node already reports it.

Where this came from

On 19 August 2026 the network's signing node went quiet for about a hundred minutes. Nodes with a qualified graphics chip kept going, because they check the proof themselves. Everything else parked, correctly, exactly where the signatures ended.

Every watchdog that could not tell those apart reported a stall for the whole window and dialled peers that had nothing to give. That is the expensive part. An operator warned wrongly often enough stops reading warnings, and that is how the next real outage gets missed.

What it does

Reads your node every few minutes and decides which of the two states you are in.
When you are genuinely behind, dials the archive peers that can serve you, at most once every ten minutes. On 16 August 2026 a three hour production stall cleared 21 seconds after that handshake.
When the network is merely waiting, says so and does nothing.
Writes one small JSON file with the whole picture: heights, the signed frontier and your lag, your peers, which of them actually feed you confirmations, which ones you serve, disk, and how long each clock has been still.

What it will never do

Restart your node

A restart throws away the peer set that is usually your only source of confirmations, and an unclean stop has ruined node data before. Crash recovery belongs to your service manager. Reacting to a stall is a different job.

Touch your data or keys

Changing a node's signer configuration over an existing chain is a one way door. The node refuses to start, and the repair it suggests deletes state before failing the same check again.

Pester other operators

A signing node serves only the last 16 blocks and bans a peer for 24 hours after 32 ignored requests. Historical requests belong on archives, and the Guardian respects both limits.

Install it

Copy this one line into the terminal on the machine your node runs on, and press enter.

curl -fsSL https://easybtx.com/install-node-guardian.sh | bash

That is the whole thing. It finds your node and your btx-cli by itself, installs one small script, sets it to run every five minutes including after a reboot, and then prints your node's health in plain language. It asks for nothing and creates no account.

It finds your node. No paths to type. If your node is running, it reads them from the running process.

It checks the node answers before installing anything, so you find out immediately if something is off.

It schedules itself with a systemd timer if it can, or a cron entry if it cannot.

It tells you what it found, in a sentence. Not a status code, an actual sentence.

After that, your node's health is one command away:

cat ~/.btx-guardian/health.json

Changed your mind? The installer prints the removal command when it finishes, and it removes everything.

Prefer to read the script before running it, or install by hand?

Sensible. Nothing here should be run on trust. The installer and the script itself are both short and readable, and the README covers the manual path, the configuration options, and one detail worth knowing even if you never run this: a node only asks peers that are manual or noban for signed confirmations. A peer that is merely connected is never asked for anything, which is the usual reason a node starves with a healthy looking peer list.

Requirements are bash, python3 and your btx-cli. That is all.

Already built in

You do not need this if you run our apps. The same logic ships inside the easyNode for BTX app and the BTX Keeper, which make the same distinction and dial the same peers on their own. The Guardian is for everyone else: a pool, an exchange, an explorer, a mining node, anything that is not our software.

Why it is free

Our explorer serves wallet data, and it can only be as reliable as the network it reads. During one week of incidents in August 2026 a census found a single reachable node serving the full confirmation history. We cannot fix that by polishing our own node. The only fix is more healthy nodes run by people we will never meet.

So every operator who catches a stall early, or correctly ignores a network pause instead of restarting a healthy node in frustration, makes the chain steadier for all of us. There is nothing to buy here, no token, and nothing earned by running it. That is not modesty, it is the design.

Install it See the live network