BP Node

Bitcoin blockchain indexing and wallet notification node. It may be considered Electrum server or Esplora replacement, being faster, providing modern binary API, supporting wallet descriptors, LN-specific queries, client-side-validation tech like RGB, modern publication-subscribe interfaces, Noise encryption in network connectivity, asymmetric cryptographic client authentication and many more.

The node designed and implemented by Dr Maxim Orlovsky as a part of LNP/BP Labs effort in building the foundation for LNP/BP layer 2 and 3 bitcoin application ecosystem. It is based on other LNP/BP projects such as BP Core Lib, BP Standard Lib, BP Wallet Lib and can be easily integrated with the rest of LNP/BP nodes like LNP Node.

In the future it is planned to upgrade the node into a fully-validating bitcoin node by using bitcoinkernel library for validating blocks.

Components

This repository contains the following crates:

• bp-node: main indexing daemon, which can be used as an embedded multi-thread service, or compiled into a standalone binary (bpd);
• bp-client: client to work with the daemon and a command-line utility bp-cli;
• bp-rpc: a shared crate between bp-node and bp-client.

Node Architecture

The node operates as a set of threads, communicating through Crossbeam channels. It leverages microservices.rs and netservices.rs crates, which serves as the node non-blocking reactor-based (see io-reactor) microservice frameworks.

The node daemon has the following components:

• Broker, integrating all services and managing their communications;
• RPC: reactor-based thread managing incoming client connections, notifying them about changes to the subscribed information;
• Persistence, an embedded ReDB database;
• Block importer: a client connecting an integration service (see below) to bitcoin blockchain provider (Bitcoin Core, other Bitcoin nodes or indexers) receiving downloaded and new blocks and adding them into the database;
• Query workers, thread pool running queries for the client subscriptions in the database.

In order to operate one also needs to provide a node with an interface to bitcoin blocks integrating it with either Bitcoin Core, or any other node or indexer.

By default, the node exposes a binary RPC API over TCP, which can be exposed as more high-level APIs (HTTP REST, Websocket-based or JSON-RPC) using special adaptor services.

OS Support

The project currently supports only Linux and UNIX OSes. Support for macOS is currently broken due to use of a Rust language unstable feature on macOS platform by one of the project dependencies, and will be recovered soon. Windows support is a work-in-progress, requiring downstream io-reactor framework changes.