Speeding up sync for your DigiByte Core Wallet

Here’s a quick guide how to speed up the sync period of the DigiByte core wallet.

DigiByte is the longest UTXO blockchain in existence which has almost 19 million blocks, the size of the these blocks is around 36GB as of March 2024.

It is not too much compared to Bitcoin’s chain size which is over 550GB. Sync process of the DigiByte core wallet usually takes 8 to 16 hours according to your bandwidth and hardware specifications. This period can be significantly shortened when you use an SSD storage. After all it is still pretty acceptable time period for setting up a full node but if you have a low bandwidth and weak hardware or if you are in hurry then you may need a faster way.

Downloading a copy of the blockchain is the most known way to speed core wallet sync up. In fact, it’s not a good way to keep decentralization at a high level but if you really need it, there is nothing wrong with using it.

If you are ready, let’s take the necessary steps together:

1) If you are installing the DGB core wallet for the first time, download it for your operating system; Windows, macOS, Linux.Install it as usual but do not run it at this phase.If you already have a core wallet and trying to clean install or upgrade, backup your wallet.dat file (File > Backup Wallet) and shut down your core wallet.

2) Download the two .zip files from here and here. Due to quota limitations on google drive, it was necessary to split the files in to two archives. (If you see "Daily quota exceeded error" you can bypass it by following instructions in this video.) It's about 24GB compressed, as of March 2024. The best thing about these files is that they are hosted on Google servers ensuring that you can reach your maximum download speed wherever you are in the world. That means you can download them fairly fast if you have 100Mbps or higher download speed.

3) After the download is complete, go to folder below according to your OS. (You may need to set hidden files as visible, then create DigiByte folder at this phase.)
Windows: Users\Username\Appdata\Roaming\DigiByte\ (Or run%AppData%\DigiByte)
macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/DigiByte/
Linux: ~/.digibyte/

4) Delete all files EXCEPT wallet.dat file (or 'wallets' folder, if it exists) from your DigiByte folder.

5) Copy the two .zip files you downloaded, into the DigiByte folder and unzip them directly into that folder. Do not create a new folder while unzipping it, blocks folder and wallet.dat file must be in the same folder. There’s a small .txt file with some instructions, included in the two .zip files.

6) You can delete the two .zip files after unzipping them, or keep them for future use.

7) Now you are ready to run your core wallet. At first start, it will ask you the default chain folder which points the folder you prepared. Do not change it unless you prepared a folder in a different location. Your core wallet will be ready to use in a few minutes and start contributing to the DigiByte blockchain.

You can also open the port 12024 on your router and forward it to a fixed local ip address of the your computer. For port forwarding instructions please click here.