# Minimum requirements

The most common way for a beginner to run a validator using the Creditcoin Docker image is on a cloud server running Linux. We strongly recommend using a recent Debian Linux OS. For this guide we will be using **Ubuntu 22.04**, but the instructions should be similar for other platforms.

{% hint style="warning" %}
Creditcoin does not currently support Macs using Apple silicon, such as the M1, M2 and M3. The provided Docker image is Linux x86\_64 (amd64) only.
{% endhint %}

* **CPU**
  * Intel Core i5-8400 or better
    * 6 Cores @ 2.8Ghz
    * 9M Cache
* **Storage**
  * Needs to be sufficient for targeted chain
  * 512G+ recommended for CC3 mainnet as of 2026-02-03
* **Memory**
  * 8GB
* **System**
  * Ubuntu 22.04 (Linux Kernel 5.16 or newer)
* **Tokens**
  * The minimum stake required to run a validator is documented per environment [here](https://docs.creditcoin.org/environments).

### Running hardware benchmarks <a href="#running-hardware-benchmarks" id="running-hardware-benchmarks"></a>

{% hint style="warning" %}
It is strongly recommended that validators either meet or exceed these hardware specifications in order to ensure that they can process all blocks in time. If you use suboptimal hardware you will possibly run into performance issues, get less era points, and potentially even get slashed.
{% endhint %}

\
The transaction weights in Creditcoin are benchmarked on reference hardware. We ran the benchmark on a memory optimized `Standard_E4as_v4` VM instance of Azure.\
\
To make sure your validator meets these specifications, you can [build the ](https://github.com/gluwa/creditcoin3)Creditcoin3 node with `cargo build --release --features runtime-benchmarks` and execute `creditcoin-node benchmark machine --chain dev` to get a hardware report:

```
2024-01-16 15:58:46 Running machine benchmarks...
2024-01-16 15:59:12
+----------+----------------+-------------+-------------+-------------------+
| Category | Function       | Score       | Minimum     | Result            |
+===========================================================================+
| CPU      | BLAKE2-256     | 941.53 MiBs | 783.27 MiBs | ✅ Pass (120.2 %) |
|----------+----------------+-------------+-------------+-------------------|
| CPU      | SR25519-Verify | 427.06 KiBs | 560.67 KiBs | ❌ Fail ( 76.2 %) |
|----------+----------------+-------------+-------------+-------------------|
| Memory   | Copy           | 14.56 GiBs  | 11.49 GiBs  | ✅ Pass (126.7 %) |
|----------+----------------+-------------+-------------+-------------------|
| Disk     | Seq Write      | 1.00 GiBs   | 950.00 MiBs | ✅ Pass (108.2 %) |
|----------+----------------+-------------+-------------+-------------------|
| Disk     | Rnd Write      | 437.80 MiBs | 420.00 MiBs | ✅ Pass (104.2 %) |
+----------+----------------+-------------+-------------+-------------------+
From 5 benchmarks in total, 4 passed and 1 failed (10% fault tolerance).
2024-01-16 15:59:12 The hardware fails to meet the requirements
```