So I’ve decided to dabble a little bit with Syscoin, considering it shows a lot of promise as an alternative to Ethereum, and will even support NFTs on the up and coming version 4.2. Also, there’s an interesting bridge solution for interoperability between Syscoin and Ethereum, so it might be worth a shot.

It wasn’t so straightforward to get it up and running on a Mac though, as there were scarce results coming up in searches. Admittedly, the process isn’t so different from Linux, but since even that isn’t abundantly documented (at least for the current 4.1 version os Syscoin), here goes:

  1. Get the latest release binary (at the time of writing that’s 4.1.3, available here) - just find the .dmg file and download it
  2. Execute the dmg file and follow the usual installation process
  3. Create a new folder for your testnet data
  4. Inside that folder, create a syscoin.conf file, with the following content: 
    testnet=1
[test]
listen=1
daemon=1
server=1
port=18369
rpcport=18370
gethtestnet=1
addnode=54.190.239.153
addnode=52.40.171.92
assetindex=1

    (the last line is not mandatory, but I’ve found that without it I’m not able to issue new tokens on the testnet)

  5. Launch the syscoin-qt application that got installed during the installation process on 2
  6. When prompted to select a path, pick the one you’ve created on 3
  7. Wait until everything gets synced up

At this point, you’ve got a testnet node up and running, and all you need to do is create a new wallet. Also, go to settings and turn on masternodes and coin operation. You’ll need to restart the application for those changes to go into effect.

Finally, you can go to the console window, and type getnewaddress “your address name”, and ask someone on the #support channel of the Discord server for some tsys to get you going! Your address should be somethink like this: tsys1qn0cjznd9med2nplsut3n9nfhce0kpd5x8l2xxy

In case you’re planning on issuing new tokens, I’ll also add the steps for quickly creating one, but please note that this is for v4.2 (as described here:

  1. Open syscoin-qt
  2. Go to the console window
  3. type the following command: assetnew 100 “TOKEN” “token description” “” 8 10000 127 “” {} {}
  4. You’ll get back some json with the txid and asset_guid attributes. Go ahead and check the token specification by typing the following command: assetinfo
  5. If the attributes shown match the ones you’ve specified on 3 you’re good to go! Issue some tokens with the assetsend command (use ‘help assetsend’ if you need a few hints). You should get back something like this:
{
  "txid": "2e304cacaf2924928c9f6058dd318b634fbcf3dc6bdbb01ffe2697936452d1b7",
  "assets_issued_count": 1,
  "assets_issued": [
    {
      "asset_guid": "3952032929",
      "amount": 100.00000000,
      "sys_amount": 1.00000000
    }
  ]
}