Validator Moniker Picture & Profile Setup With Keybase

Your validator's public identity — picture, tagline, website, and contact — is set by combining a Keybase account with a single on-chain edit-validator transaction. Once done, your validator appears with a real avatar and profile everywhere it is listed: DriveStats, foxxone.one Validator Insights, block explorers, and delegator apps.

Most Infinite Drive validators still show a plain letter placeholder because this step is skipped. It takes about ten minutes and materially raises how professional your validator looks to delegators.

Last updated: 2026-07-09

Why Bother

Cosmos SDK validators expose a description block on-chain with fields for moniker, identity, website, security contact, and details. The identity field points at a Keybase PGP key fingerprint — and Keybase publishes the avatar attached to that key. Any tool that reads the chain and understands the convention will resolve your identity to the picture and profile you have set on Keybase.

Places this affects:

• DriveStats validator listings
• foxxone.one Validator Insights (main list + per-validator page + embed badge)
• Cosmos-family block explorers
• Delegator apps and wallets that show validator directories
• Governance UIs that list proposers and voters

Without the identity set, every one of the above falls back to your moniker's first letter or a generic placeholder.

What You Will Need

• A Keybase account (free, keybase.io)
• The operator key that controls your validator (the same one you used to create it)
• A small amount of native token in the operator wallet for the transaction fee
• Shell access to your Infinite Drive node. The commands in Step 4 assume the standard drive.sh service wrapper; strip the wrapper if you run infinited directly on the host.

Step 1 — Create a Keybase Account

1. Sign up at keybase.io. Pick a username you are happy to associate publicly with your validator.
2. Verify your email address.
3. Optionally install the Keybase desktop or CLI app — the browser flow is enough for the identity step, but the CLI helps if you want to manage keys or files later.

You do not need to link social accounts, chat with other users, or use the wider Keybase feature set. All that matters for validator identity is that you own a PGP key on the account and that the account has a profile picture attached.

Step 2 — Get Your PGP Key Fingerprint

The on-chain identity field takes the first 16 characters of your Keybase PGP key fingerprint. There are two ways to get one:

Option A — Generate a new PGP key on Keybase

1. Sign in to keybase.io.
2. Open your profile page, click Add a PGP key, and follow the "generate a new PGP key" flow.
3. Once generated, Keybase displays a fingerprint. The full form is 40 hex characters in groups of four.

Option B — Command line (if you already run Keybase locally)

keybase pgp gen

Follow the prompts, then list your keys:

keybase pgp list

Whichever route you use, extract the first 16 characters of the fingerprint with spaces removed. Example: a fingerprint of A1B2C3D4 E5F60789 A1B2… becomes the identity string A1B2C3D4E5F60789. The Step 4 commands below use the same placeholder — swap it for your own before running the transaction.

Step 3 — Upload Your Avatar

1. Go to your Keybase profile page while logged in.
2. Click your existing avatar (or the placeholder) and upload a picture.
3. Ideal source image: square, at least 400 × 400 pixels. Keybase serves a 360 × 360 cached copy to downstream tools — starting larger keeps it crisp.
4. Save.

That is the picture every explorer, wallet, and monitoring tool will fetch once your on-chain identity is set. Pick something you are happy for delegators to associate with your validator long term.

Step 4 — Set Identity On-Chain

Run edit-validator from the machine that holds the validator's operator key. The commands below are the exact form used on a standard Infinite Drive node running under the drive.sh service wrapper. Each block is a separate transaction and can be run independently — you do not have to update every field at once.

Two placeholders to swap before running any of these commands:

• --from my-validator — my-validator is the local key alias in your keyring (whatever you named your validator's operator key when you added it via keys add or keys import). It is not the validator's moniker, address, or on-chain identity. Common alternatives are validator, operator, or your own convention. Run ./drive.sh exec infinite bash -lc 'infinited keys list --keyring-backend file --home ~/.infinited' to see the aliases available on your node.
• --identity "A1B2C3D4E5F60789" — swap for your own 16-character Keybase PGP fingerprint from Step 2.

Update Validator Picture (identity only)

Points the on-chain identity field at your Keybase PGP fingerprint. This is the single change that resolves the avatar across DriveStats, foxxone.one, and explorers.

cd ~/drive/services/node0-infinite

./drive.sh exec infinite bash -lc 'infinited tx staking edit-validator \
  --identity "A1B2C3D4E5F60789" \
  --from my-validator \
  --chain-id infinite_421018-1 \
  --keyring-backend file \
  --home ~/.infinited \
  --gas auto --gas-adjustment 1.3 --gas-prices 5000000000drop -y'

Set Validator Metadata (website, tagline, security contact)

Bundle the descriptive fields that appear alongside your validator. Leave any flag as an empty string (--details "") to clear it explicitly, or omit the flag entirely to leave the current value untouched.

cd ~/drive/services/node0-infinite

./drive.sh exec infinite bash -lc 'infinited tx staking edit-validator \
  --website "https://your-validator-site.example" \
  --details "Your validator tagline — shown under the moniker" \
  --security-contact "[email protected]" \
  --from my-validator \
  --chain-id infinite_421018-1 \
  --keyring-backend file \
  --home ~/.infinited \
  --gas auto --gas-adjustment 1.3 --gas-prices 5000000000drop -y'

Change Moniker (rename the validator)

Use --new-moniker to change your display name — emojis are allowed. Note the flag is --new-moniker, not --moniker.

cd ~/drive/services/node0-infinite

./drive.sh exec infinite bash -lc 'infinited tx staking edit-validator \
  --new-moniker "🦊 YourValidatorName" \
  --from my-validator \
  --chain-id infinite_421018-1 \
  --keyring-backend file \
  --home ~/.infinited \
  --gas auto --gas-adjustment 1.3 --gas-prices 5000000000drop -y'

If you do not run under drive.sh — for example a bare-metal setup with the infinited binary directly on the host — strip the ./drive.sh exec infinite bash -lc '…' wrapper and run the inner infinited tx staking edit-validator … command directly.

For the authoritative Infinite Drive CLI reference and any chain-specific parameter updates, check docs.infinitedrive.xyz.

Step 5 — Verify

Wait a minute or two for the transaction to confirm and for the next monitoring tick, then check:

• DriveStats — your validator page should show the new avatar and tagline
• foxxone.one Validator Insights — main table row now uses your Keybase picture; the per-validator page shows the full profile
• Your embed badge — the top-right of your foxxone.one validator page shows the updated moniker; the badge on rpc.foxxone.one now reflects the new identity within its 5-minute cache

If a tool still shows the letter placeholder after a few minutes, check its cache TTL — some listings hold identity state for hours. The chain state itself updates immediately.

Common Pitfalls

• Wrong length identity string. Cosmos SDK expects exactly 16 hex characters. 40-char full fingerprints, spaced fingerprints, or truncated values below 16 chars will be rejected or ignored by downstream tools.
• Uploading to a Keybase account without a PGP key. The avatar only resolves via the PGP fingerprint linkage. No PGP key on the account means no downstream picture, even if the profile is set.
• Using a personal account you cannot commit to long-term. The identity string points at whichever account holds that PGP fingerprint. If you delete the Keybase account later, every validator listing loses your picture. Use a stable account that you plan to keep.
• Not funding the operator wallet. edit-validator is a real transaction with a real fee. If the operator wallet is empty, the transaction fails.
• Signing from the wrong key. Only the operator key that created the validator can update its description. Delegator keys, cold wallets, or unrelated addresses will be rejected.
• Using --moniker instead of --new-moniker. The rename flag is --new-moniker. Using --moniker will not change the display name and may error out on strict CLI versions.

Bonus — Full Description Field Reference

Cosmos SDK edit-validator accepts these description flags. All are optional — pass only the ones you want to change:

• --new-moniker — new display name for the validator (emojis allowed)
• --identity — 16-char Keybase PGP fingerprint (the picture and identity anchor)
• --details — short tagline shown under the moniker on most explorers
• --website — full URL, https strongly recommended
• --security-contact — public email for coordinated-disclosure security reports

Non-description fields you can also set via edit-validator:

• --commission-rate — new commission rate (bounded by max rate and max change per day)
• --min-self-delegation — floor on your own delegated stake to the validator

These belong to separate operational discussions and are not usually changed in the same session as identity setup.

Summary

Ten minutes on Keybase plus a single edit-validator transaction gets your validator a proper picture, tagline, website, and security contact across the entire ecosystem. If you already went to the trouble of running validator infrastructure, this is the smallest possible step to make it look like it — and to signal to delegators that you take the public-facing side of the role seriously.