geohot/erigon

Erigon is a program that lets you run an Ethereum node, essentially a computer that participates in the Ethereum network by validating transactions, storing blockchain data, and relaying information. Its main selling point is efficiency: it's designed to do the same job as other Ethereum clients but with less disk space, less memory, and faster setup times. If you've ever wanted to run your own Ethereum node but were put off by the massive hardware requirements, this project aims to make that more feasible. Under the hood, the project rethinks how blockchain data is stored and synced. Instead of writing data to the database one piece at a time, it batches information together and uses temporary files to preprocess data before inserting it, which makes the database much faster. The initial sync process, downloading and verifying the entire history of Ethereum, is broken into sequential "stages" like downloading block bodies, executing blocks, and validating hashes. This rearchitected approach can get a full Ethereum node up and running in under two days on a decent SSD, compared to the longer sync times typical of other clients. This tool is built for people who need to run a full Ethereum node but want to be smart about resources. That includes solo stakers who need an execution layer paired with a consensus client (it's tested to work with Lighthouse), developers building decentralized apps who need fast access to blockchain data via the JSON-RPC interface, or mining operators. It supports remote mining, where the node handles block templates but external machines do the actual mining computation. You can also split the RPC daemon, the part that answers queries, onto a separate machine to balance load. One notable design choice is that the query system (the RPC daemon) is split out from the core node process entirely. It can run on the same machine using shared memory for speed, or on a completely different machine over a network connection. This makes it flexible for infrastructure setups where you might want read-only access to blockchain data without burdening the main node. The project is still labeled a "tech preview," so the team acknowledges things may break, and it requires at least 16GB of RAM and about 2TB of storage to run on Ethereum's main network.