In order to sync an archive node you will need to play back the entire block history, starting with the first availalbe Althea L1 software version and progressing through all software versions as blocks are synced until completely caught up with the chain history.
System Requirements
- NVME storage
- 1 TB available space (875GB reuqired as of Aug 13 2025. 630GB required if using transparent compression)
We recomend a filesystem with some sort of snapshot capability such as ZFS, BTRFS, XFS, or LVM+EXT4. This will allow you to make a relatively quick backup of the entire archive node state before chain upgrades without requiring double the disk space. State corruption due to process OOM, power failure, or other issues can be extremely time consuming to repair/resync. Having access to quick snapshots normally eliminates this problem by virtue of making it very easy to rollback.
We also recomend a filesystem with transparent compression such as BTRFS or ZFS. While these come with moderate to significant performance penalties during syncing disk usage for state storage will be reduced by ~28% and on modern NVME systems ZFS/BTRFS are fast enough that downloading blocks will remain your bottleneck, conserving valuable NVME storage for other purposes.
Initial setup
Download the Althea L1 v1.3 release binary or build the v1.3.0 tag on https://github.com/AltheaFoundation/althea-L1
wget https://github.com/AltheaFoundation/althea-L1/releases/download/v1.3.0/althea-linux-amd64
chmod +x althea-linux-amd64
sudo mv althea-linux-amd64 /usr/sbin/althea
One you have downloaded the binary and installed it into the PATH as appropriate for your Linux distribution run
althea init mynodename --chain-id althea_258432-1
Download the genesis file
The genesis file represents the initial state of the blockchain and is required to sync the remaining state
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AltheaFoundation/althea-L1-docs/refs/heads/main/althea-l1-mainnet-genesis.json
cp althea-l1-mainnet-genesis.json $HOME/.althea/config/genesis.json
Add seed nodes
Change the seeds field in ~/.althea/config/config.toml to contain the following:
seeds = "bc47f3e8f9134a812462e793d8767ef7334c0119@chainripper-2.althea.net:23296, ade4d8bc8cbe014af6ebdf3cb7b1e9ad36f412c0@seeds.polkachu.com:12456"
Configure your node as an archive node
Change the pruning field in ~/.althea/config/app.toml to contain the following:
pruning = "nothing"
This will prevent your node from discarding intermedate chain states as it syncs.
Start and sync
Run the following in a long running terminal, or via systemd.
althea start
The node will sync for some time, average sync time on a NVME disk backed node is about ~3 days in August of 2025. During the syncing process your node will halt several times and advise you to upgrade to a new version, follow the instructions to continue syncing. If you need to automate this process cosmosvisor is the standard solution.
Observe Sync Status and Time Remaining
You will need to wait for your Althea node to fully sync before progressing in the instructions </br>
You can issue the following command to check the sync status of the Althea Node </br>
althea status 2>&1| jq .SyncInfo.catching_up
Value of ‘false’ means that it is now synced, ‘true’ means that sync is still in process.