Adding Custom Staking Contract through Pre-Deployment to the Genesis File

[Salekin-Nabil]

Hi everyone, I've created my own cluster of Polygon Edge with 5 physical nodes. I've run it on the POS consensus mechanism, and initially, I ran 2 boot nodes and 2 regular validator nodes. Later on, made the 5th node a validator via staking through the default staking contract which is created during the creation of the genesis file which is 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000001001.

Now I wanted to make the new node a validator through a custom smart contract of staking and not the default one. Is it possible?

It's worth mentioning that for doing that I followed the predeployment smart contract section of Polygon Edge's documentation. I cloned the staking smart contract from the Polygon Edge repository, and updated the genesis file using predeployment. The functions of staking and unstaking are working on it, and also getting added to the validator list, but when I ran the new node it was only syncing the blocks that were validated by the rest of the 4 nodes and the new node wasn't validating any block. It seems that the custom staking smart contract that's predeployed and updated to the genesis file is behaving like a general smart contract and has no connection to the network. What I mean to say is, may be it's creating the validator list but it's unknown to the network. Please help me with this issue, and suggest me how it can be resolved.