Connect Electron Cash Wallet to Fulcrum

Introduction

This guide provides step-by-step instructions to connect your Electron Cash wallet to your own Fulcrum node, increasing your privacy and security.

Electron Cash is a Bitcoin Cash (BCH) wallet.

Prerequisites

Complete the steps to set up Fulcrum on DigitalOcean first.
Wait for Fulcrum to fully index the BCH blockchain before trying to connect your wallets.
Basic familiarity with running terminal commands. This guide uses the Terminal app on a Mac.

Quick Start for macOS

1. Download Electron Cash from the Electron Cash website.

2. Optional: Turn off Wi-Fi / internet to avoid sending your addresses to another server before you've entered your own server settings.

3. Open the Electron Cash app.

4. Create a wallet.

5. Go to Tools > Network..., then go to the "Server" tab and update the settings:

Make sure "Select server automatically" is NOT checked.
Make sure "Connect only to preferred servers" is NOT checked (since your server isn't set as a preferred server yet).
Enter your droplet's IP address in the "Server" field.
Enter "50002" in the next field for your port.

6. Turn on Wi-Fi / internet.

Note: For more privacy and security, skip this Quick Start section and follow the full configuration steps to set your server as a preferred server and use single server mode.

Quick Start for iOS

1. Download Electron Cash from the App Store.

2. Optional: Turn on Airplane Mode (turn off Wi-Fi / cellular / internet) to avoid sending your addresses to another server before you've entered your own server settings.

3. Open the Electron Cash app.

4. Create a wallet.

5. Go to Settings > Network Settings:

Make sure "Select server automatically" is NOT checked.
Enter your droplet's IP address in the "Server" field.
Enter "50002" in the next field for your port.

6. Turn off Airplane Mode (turn on Wi-Fi / cellular / internet).

Full Configuration Steps for macOS

For more privacy and security, you can follow the detailed steps below instead of the "Quick Start" section.

Download Electron Cash

Download the Electron Cash disk image file (.dmg file).

Optional: Verify the Electron Cash Download

We want to use gpg to verify the Electron Cash download, but on macOS, gpg is not installed by default.

First we'll install Homebrew, The Missing Package Manager for macOS. Then we'll install gpg using Homebrew.

Go to the Homebrew website and follow the instructions to install Homebrew.

After installing Homebrew, in the Terminal app on your Mac, turn off Homebrew analytics:

brew analytics off

Install gnupg as our GPG client so we can verify signatures:

brew install gnupg

Download the Electron Cash signature file (.asc file).

Download the Electron Cash checksum file (.sha256sum file).

Download the Electron Cash signing key.

Change to the directory where you downloaded all the files:

cd ~/Downloads

Import the signing key:

gpg --import calinkey.txt

Set a version variable to match the version number of Electron Cash that you downloaded:

VERSION="4.4.2"

Verify that the checksums file is cryptographically signed by the release signing key (should see "Good signature" in output):

gpg --verify Electron-Cash-$VERSION-macosx.dmg.asc

Verify the signed checksum against the actual checksum of your download (Should see "OK" in output):

shasum --check Electron-Cash-$VERSION-macosx.dmg.sha256sum

Install Electron Cash

Double-click the Electron-Cash disk image (.dmg) file to open it, then drag Electron-Cash.app into your Applications folder.

Connect Electron Cash to Fulcrum

We'll initially open Electron Cash from the command line with flags to force it to connect to your server for increased privacy.

This initial launch will also generate a configuration file that we'll modify later.

Copy your droplet's public IPv4 address from the DigitalOcean dashboard.

Execute the following command in the Terminal app to connect to a single server (-1) with your server address (-s) on port 5002 using SSL (replace YOUR_DROPLET_IP with your droplet's IP address):

/Applications/Electron-Cash.app/Contents/MacOS/Electron-Cash -1 -s YOUR_DROPLET_IP:50002:s

Now quit Electron Cash so it isn't open while you modify the config file, otherwise it might overwrite your changes.

Next, we'll add your server to the list of preferred servers. Edit the Electron Cash config file using the nano text editor:

nano ~/.electron-cash/config

Then modify the file to include the following lines (replace both instances of YOUR_DROPLET_IP with your droplet's IP address):


"auto_connect": false,
"server": "YOUR_DROPLET_IP:50002:s",
"server_whitelist_added": [
    "YOUR_DROPLET_IP:50002:s"
],
"whitelist_servers_only": true

Save the file and exit the nano text editor (Control+O, Return, Control+X).

Open Electron Cash as normal by double-clicking the application icon in your Applications folder from now on.

After you create or open a wallet, you should see a green circle in the bottom right, indicating a successful connection to your Fulcrum server.

Go to Tools > Network..., then go to the "Server" tab and verify the settings:

Verify "Select server automatically" is NOT checked.
Verify "Connect only to preferred servers" is checked (since your server is now set as a preferred server).
Verify the "Server" field is set to your droplet's IP address.
Verify the next field for your port is set to "50002".

Optional: Automator For Single Server Mode

By default, Electron Cash tries to maintain connections to 10 servers.

The app subscribes to block header notifications from all of these. Getting block headers from multiple sources is useful to detect lagging servers, chain splits, and forks. All of the connected servers will see your IP address (which might be that of a VPN/Tor/proxy, if used).

One of the servers is selected as the "main" server. If you entered your server information in the Server tab, it will be used as the main server. Electron Cash sends your wallet addresses to the main server, which is why we want to use our own server for privacy.

If you prefer to connect only to your single server (even just for block headers), Electron Cash must be launched from the command line with the "-1" flag.

You can create an Automator app that launches Electron Cash with "-1" flag. Basically, a shortcut.

Open Automator from /Applications/Automator.app
Click New Document and select Application as the document type (this allows you to save the workflow as a standalone app). Click Choose.
In the Automator window, on the left sidebar, select Actions > Utilities.
Drag the Run Shell Script action to the workflow area on the right (or double-click it to add it).
In the text box of the Run Shell Script action, enter the following command (replace YOUR_DROPLET_IP with your droplet's IP address):
```
nohup /Applications/Electron-Cash.app/Contents/MacOS/Electron-Cash -1 -s YOUR_DROPLET_IP:50002:s >/dev/null 2>&1 &
```
Save the document as an Application in the Applications folder. You can name it something like "Electron Cash My Server.app".

Now you can double-click "Electron Cash My Server.app" or launch it from Spotlight, and it will open Electron Cash for you in single server mode.

The shell script command is crafted to run in the background, because we want the Automator task to complete immediately. Otherwise, an Automator progress indicator will show in the menu bar until Electron Cash is closed. Here's an explanation of the shell script action:

nohup: Prevents the command from being terminated if the parent process exits.
-1: Connect to a single server.
-s ip:port:s: Connect to your server IP and port using SSL.
>/dev/null 2>&1: Redirects both standard output and error output to /dev/null to discard them, ensuring the script doesn't wait for output.
&: Runs the command in the background, allowing the script to exit immediately.