BP Node

Bitcoin blockchain indexing and notification node. It may be considered electrum server replacement, which is faster, provides modern API (supporting wallet descriptors and miniscript, LN-specific queries, client-side-validation tech like RGB, modern RPC subscribe interfaces with ZMQ etc). In the future it is planned to upgrade the node into a fully-validating bitcoin node by using libbitcoinconsensus library for validating blocks.

The node was originally designed and implemented by Dr Maxim Orlovsky as a part of LNP/BP Standards Association effort for 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, Descriptor Wallet, Storm Storage and can be easily integrated with the rest of LNP/BP nodes like LNP Node, RGB Node, Storm Node.

Node services

The node organized as a set of daemons or threads, interacting via ZMQ-based API with each other and with RPC clients. It leverages microservice architecture from microservices crate.

The node provides following set of services:

• bpd: main service providing clients with RPC request/reply API and managing life cycle of the rest of the node services (launching, terminating, brokering inter-service communications).
• blockd: service parsing and (in the future, using libbitcoinconsensus) validating bitcoin blocks, storing them in the database (provided by stored service from Storm Storage library). It also connects to bitcoin core node to monitor the incoming new blocks and through bpd node clients when a new valid block has been parsed.
• mempoold: manages mempool transactions.
• walletd: service instantiated for each wallet client. It knows about wallet descriptor, monitors new mempool and mined transactions and notifies subscribed client about their changes.
• watchd: watchtower service for lightning network and RGB.
• signd: service for signing bitcoin transactions and working with PSBTs. Used by wallets, lightning node etc.

Alongside these services, in the future it is planned to use lightning network (Bifrost subnetwork) through LNP Node to propagate bitcoin blocks in encrypted form to other BP Nodes (instead of using legacy bitcoin wire protocol).

RPC and client tools

The repository also contains a BP Node RPC library (bp_rpc crate in rpc directory) and command-line tool (bp-cli crate in cli directory) for querying/working with the node.