An experimental bitcoin node written in Rust using the libbitcoinkernel library. The node just validates blocks, and does not serve blocks to the network. It is meant to showcase the limited initial API of the kernel library. It is not meant to be particularly performant, or robust against misbehaving peers.

For now, IBD is done from a single peer, selected from the DNS seed nodes. If the connection to this peer happens to fail for some reason, a new peer will be selected. A direct connection can also be selected from the command line. See --help for this.

If you have the dependencies to build Bitcoin Core with IPC and a usual Rust program, you can build kernel-node. For build instructions, see the build documntation.

To run on e.g. signet:

cargo run --bin node --release -- --network signet

By default it will put data in the $HOME/.kernel-node directory.

Options:

Arguments:
        --network    Which Bitcoin network to use.
        --datadir    Data directory for blockchain and configuration.
        --connect    Connect only to this node (format: ip:port or hostname:port)
        --daemon     Run the server as a daemon

The crate binaries will compile with a compiler version of 1.84.0 or greater.

The developers of kernel-node and CI jobs are on Unix-like systems.