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I am exploring moonbeam and astar projects. I would like to know if it is possible to run a standalone network without collators or relaychain.
I am interested in running a standalone network of one of them for my research project. Any help is highly appreciated
It's possible. In this case, your network will have to run (and use) its own finality gadget (rather than that of the relay chain). You can implement the GRANDPA pallet in your network for block finality.
Using POA shouldn't be an issue, since Substrate ships with Aura, which is a POA-based consensus engine.
This guide explains how you can customize the consensus engine of your chain. You can also check out this guide to get a high-level explanation of what's involved when converting from a Parachain to a solo chain.
To run an Astar local node you have two options:
astar-local is the the closest to live networks - and have a block time of 2 sec. To run it follow these instructions and run the node with (it will run a non-persistent local instance):
./target/release/astar-collator --dev --tmp
There is also swanky-node an local environment that targets WASM development (EVM is not available in this node). You can run it the same way as astar-local
If you need to run a local network with relay-chain + parachains to use XCM you will have to use polkadot-launch but I guess this is not what you are looking for.
