What Is Old Faithful?
Understanding the Old Faithful project, it's purpose, and how to get started.
Historically speaking, the Solana ledger has only been available via Google Big Table requests. This has large cost implications and doesn't fit the decentralized ethos of blockchains to make the entire history available to review.
Yellowstone Old Faithful, or Old Faithful for short, is an open-sourced project designed to provide a solution to this problem in the Solana ecosystem.
It is a collection of tooling that can produce Content Addressable Archives (CAR's) from RocksDB archives created by Solana warehouse nodes and serve them using a standard RPC/gRPC interface.
Content Addressable Archives (CAR's)
The core of the Old Faithful is history archives in Content Addressable aRchives (CAR) format (overview, specs). These represent a verifiable, immutable view of Solana's history. The CAR files that this project generates follow a schema specifically developed for Solana’s historical archives.
The content's addressable nature means that each epoch, block, transaction, and shredding is uniquely identified by a content hash. By knowing this content hash, a user can retrieve a specific object of interest in a trustless manner, i.e., retrieve an object verifiably from a non-trusted source.
The tooling operates on (end of epoch) snapshots generated using the default solana-ledger-tool that's used by Solana warehouse nodes to record the full epoch into a single archive. No changes to the default Solana tools are required to produce such archives for Old Faithful.
Read more about Generating Old Faithful archives.
Genesis to Tip History
The second component of the Old Faithful project is OF1, a full genesis archive that contains every block from the genesis to the current epoch (with a slight delay for processing of the most recent epoch).
Triton provides a full copy of this ledger at https://files.old-faithful.net that you can download to get started without needing to build the CAR's from the RocksDB archives yourself.
Read more about hosting your own copy of Old Faithful archives.
Standard RPC Interface
Make standard Solana RPC requests to retrieve historical blocks and transactions. Existing tooling can integrate seamlessly to a full archive record.
Read more about running the Old Faithful RPC server.
Homogenous Storage
Retrievals can be made via IPFS, the Filecoin network, or even by hosting the CAR files yourself on disk, a CEPH cluster, S3 or alternative compatible object storage services, HTTP (CDN), etc.
The only real requirement is that the retrieval source you provide either publishes a standard Unix filesystem API or supports an HTTP API with range requests support.
Read more about the various data sources available.
Geyser Integrations
There is a Geyser integration that provides an easy way to perform ETL with already existing Solana Geyser plugins. You can run this on an epoch CAR file and receive Geyser notifications with blocks and transactions.
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