Cardano Hoarding Node

A service that connects to nodes in the Cardano (preprod, mainnet) network and temporarily stores all observed headers, blocks, and, in the future, transactions. Notable ones (e.g. those involved in slot disputes, invalid, or from competing forks) are retained and exposed via the HTTP API; the rest are evicted.

This makes the hoarding node useful for investigating chain disagreements, mempool anomalies, and adversarial behaviour such as block equivocation.

Running locally

The dev setup requires three services running concurrently. Open separate terminals for each.

1. PostgreSQL

nix run .#postgres

2. Cardano node (preprod)

Then start the Cardano node. On first run, the app will ask whether to bootstrap the chain database via Mithril (downloads a verified snapshot):

nix run .#cardano-node-preprod

3. Monitoring stack (optional)

Starts Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, and Promtail:

nix run .#monitoring

4. Database migrations

Apply any pending migrations before starting the node:

sqitch deploy

5. Hoarding node

cabal run

Configuration is loaded from config/dev.yaml. Any value can be overridden at runtime via environment variables — see docs/configuration.md.

Database migrations

Migrations are managed with Sqitch. With PostgreSQL running:

sqitch deploy   # apply pending migrations
sqitch status   # check current state

See db/README.md for full migration workflows.

Further documentation

Topic	Doc
Configuration & env var overrides	docs/configuration.md
Secrets management	docs/secrets.md
Database schema & migrations	docs/database-schema.md, db/README.md
Observability & metrics	docs/observability.md
Docker images	docs/docker.md
Peer discovery	docs/peer-discovery-and-connection.md