A Cardano Data Node
Tip
Looking for detailed guides and tutorials? The complete user guide for Dolos is available at docs.txpipe.io/dolos.
Cardano nodes traditionally assume one of two roles: block producer or relay. Dolos introduces a third role: the data node — optimized for keeping an updated ledger and responding to queries while requiring a fraction of the resources.
Dolos connects directly to the Cardano network using Ouroboros Node-to-Node (N2N) mini-protocols (via Pallas). It relies on honest upstream peers rather than performing full consensus validation, enabling significant resource savings.
- Low resource footprint — Runs with a small fraction of the memory and CPU required by a traditional Cardano node
- Rich API surface — Multiple protocols to match your existing stack: REST, gRPC, HTTP, JSON-RPC, and Ouroboros
- Flexible storage mode — Choose your data retention: ledger-only, sliding window, or full archive
- Full multi-era support — Handles all Cardano eras from Byron through Conway, including full governance support (DReps, proposals, voting)
Choose your storage profile:
| Profile | Description | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| Ledger-only | Current state only (UTxO set, pools, protocol params) — minimal disk | Services needing only current ledger state |
| Sliding history | Configurable retention window for recent data | Most dApps that need recent history |
| Full archive | Complete chain history from genesis | Explorers, analytics, archival |
Choose your API surface:
| API | Protocol | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| MiniBF | REST (Blockfrost-compatible) | Existing Blockfrost integrations, wallets, SDKs |
| MiniKupo | HTTP (Kupo-compatible) | Pattern-based UTxO matching, chain indexing |
| UTxO RPC | gRPC / gRPC-Web | High-performance streaming, browser clients |
| TRP | JSON-RPC (Tx3) | Transaction building with Tx3 framework |
| Ouroboros | Node-to-Client | cardano-cli compatibility, Ogmios workflows |
- Full historical reward logs — Complete reward distribution calculations and epoch state management
- Stake distribution snapshots — Historical stake snapshots and epoch boundary logic
- Pool registry & metadata — Pool registration, retirement handling, and delegator tracking
- Asset registry — Token and NFT metadata tracking with CIP-25 support
- Script indexing — Support of search / retrieval of scripts / datums by hash
- Governance data — DRep registration, proposals, and voting state (Conway era)
- Mempool-aware transaction submit — Tracks pending, inflight, and finalized UTxO states, enabling transaction chaining workflows
- Local devnet mode — Ephemeral single-node network via for offline development
- Fast Mithril bootstrap — Sync mainnet from Mithril snapshot in under 20 hours
- Dolos snapshots — Export and load node state in minutes for rapid deployment
- Multi-platform binaries — Native packages for macOS (Apple Silicon), Linux (ARM64/x64), Windows x64, plus Docker images
- Dual storage backends — Choose between Redb v3 or Fjall LSM-tree based on your workload
- OpenTelemetry integration — Distributed tracing with OTLP export
- Prometheus metrics — Health and performance monitoring endpoints
- Rust implementation — Memory safety, high performance, and small binary size
Dolos follows a modular, layered architecture:
- Core abstractions (
dolos-core) — Storage traits (State, Archive, WAL, Index), entity-delta system, and batch processing pipeline - Cardano logic (
dolos-cardano) — Era-specific block processing, validation, reward calculation, and UTxO delta computation - Storage backends — Pluggable implementations: Redb v3 or Fjall LSM-tree
- Service layer — gRPC, REST, and Ouroboros protocol servers
Data is organized into four isolated storage layers: State (current ledger), Archive (historical blocks), WAL (crash recovery), and Index (fast lookups). State mutations use an entity-delta pattern enabling efficient rollbacks without full snapshots.
We highly recommend following the quick start guide on our documentation site for detailed step-by-step instructions.
# macOS
brew install txpipe/tap/dolos
# Linux
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf \
https://github.com/txpipe/dolos/releases/latest/download/dolos-installer.sh | sh
# Windows (PowerShell)
powershell -c "irm https://github.com/txpipe/dolos/releases/latest/download/dolos-installer.ps1 | iex"
# Docker
docker run ghcr.io/txpipe/dolos:latest
# Node
npm install @txpipe/dolosOnce installed:
dolos init # Interactive configuration and bootstrapping📖 Full documentation: https://docs.txpipe.io/dolos
PRs are welcome! Please ensure your changes pass CI checks.
See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.
Dolos is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE for details.