GLIF Agent Website Tutorial Part I— Preparation Setup
Understand the main components of GLIF Agents, and get prepared to create an Agent on the GLIF website
In Part I of the GLIF Agent Setup Tutorial, we’re covering two topics:
Understand the different components of GLIF Agents and the basics of how they work.
Prepare to create an Agent on the GLIF website.
If you already understand the basics and you’re ready to get started creating your Agent on the website, you can skip Part I and go directly to Part II.
GLIF Agents — The Basics
Agent — An Agent is a smart contract that borrows FIL from GLIF. You will deploy, own, and operate your Agent smart contract yourself (covered in Part II of the tutorial). In order to borrow FIL, your Agent needs collateral, which it gets by taking ownership of your Filecoin miner(s). A more detailed description of Agents can be found here.
Agent owner wallet — The Agent’s owner wallet is the wallet that controls your Agent. Whoever is in control of your Agent’s owner wallet can operate your Agent. It is very important to keep the Agent’s owner wallet secure, which GLIF will help you do automatically.
When creating an Agent on the GLIF website, your Agent owner wallet will be a Filecoin multisig wallet with at least 2 signers, though 3 signers are recommended. This is the most secure type of wallet you can use to own your Agent.
Multisig wallets
A multisig wallet is a smart contract wallet with multiple signing parties (“signers”) attached to it. Multisigs enforce a minimum number of signers to approve a specific proposal before executing the transaction. Multisig wallets have a proposal/approval flow where:
One of the multisig signers submits a proposal to execute a transaction
The other multisig signers must approve the proposal
Once the minimum number of signatures have approved the proposal, the transaction executes
GLIF Agent Multisig Owner Wallet Configuration
Multisig wallets on Filecoin are generally very flexible in their configuration, however, GLIF recommends a specific, more secure configuration with 3 signers:
Signer 1 — “the proposer” — is a Filecoin Snap wallet, also called “FILSnap wallet” (more tutorial on this here)
Signer 2 — “the approver” — is a Filecoin Ledger wallet or another FilSnap Wallet or burner wallet
Signer 3 — “backup” — is another (different) Filecoin ledger wallet or another FilSnap Wallet or another burner wallet
The GLIF Agent Multisig Owner Wallet is recommended to have a signing threshold of 2 — meaning, 2 signatures are required in order to execute a transaction. In other words:
Signer 1 (“the proposer”) proposes a transaction to the Agent Multisig Owner Wallet to perform some action (like borrow FIL from GLIF)
Signer 2 (“the approver”) approves the transaction proposed in step 1
The transaction executes successfully
If you lose any of your signer keys (either Ledger devices or the Filecoin Snap wallet) then you can easily replace it with a new one! This is why Multisig wallets are a more secure way to own your Agent.
Prepare to Create an Agent
In order to prepare for Agent creation, you’ll need 3 addresses:
FILSnap Wallet Address 1
FILSnap Wallet Address 2 OR Ledger Address 1 OR Burner Wallet Address 1
FILSnap Wallet Address 3 OR Ledger Address 2 OR Burner Wallet Address 2
For details on obtaining a FilSnap, Burner, or Ledger wallet address, please refer to the tutorial by clicking the link.
For added security, it’s recommended that you use two separate Ledger devices, but it is OK to start with 1 Ledger Device and then switch to use 2 separate Ledger devices soon after.
If you do not want to use your Ledger, you can set up another FilSnap address or burner wallet address as your second or third address. It could work, but using a Ledger is recommended to enhance security.
Next steps
Once you have 3 Filecoin wallet addresses:
FILSnap wallet address
2 Ledger wallet addresses or burner wallet addresses
Then you are ready to move on to Part II of this tutorial.
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