Work is underway on the Chronik Indexer project for eCash. This project was recently funded by the GNC. The project has multiple stages, the first of which was to open-source the existing Chronik codebase. Subsequent stages comprise development activity to integrate the Chronik Indexer directly into the Bitcoin ABC node software, and provide first-class indexing infrastructure for eCash.

What is the Chronik Indexer?

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An indexer is one of the most important pieces of software for blockchain applications. It is a critical piece of infrastructure that other applications (such as wallets and explorers) are built on top of. Proper and reliable indexing infrastructure for Bitcoin-like chains has been the dream of developers for years. Current eCash indexers are inefficient, buggy, or have mediocre code quality. By addressing these issues, Chronik allows for a faster, cheaper, and more reliable eCash development and indexing experience. In addition, Chronik is designed to be forward-looking and upgradable, making it well suited to the long-term goals of building an indexer directly into the eCash node, providing first-class Avalanche support, and making the indexing of new protocols as easy as possible.

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Chronik has the potential to drastically simplify the entire eCash development stack, and cause a cascade of developers to build new protocols on top of eCash — all of which can be indexed by Chronik.

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“RaiPay shares eCash’s vision of bringing peer-to-peer electronic cash to the world. We’ve been working persistently on realizing this vision, be it in Saipan or anywhere else that we’ve applied our skills. One thing that always has been a huge pain has been the indexer infrastructure. We’ve had some success with BCHD but it always has been lacking. With Chronik we finally have something that won’t have severe downsides. We’re very happy the GNC funded our work and we believe it will greatly propel eCash as one of the most useful chains out there.” - Tobias Ruck of RaiPay

Chronik Project details

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Currently, Chronik is a stand-alone binary written in Rust, which connects to a

modified eCash node (bitcoind), such that it exposes an NNG (nanomsg next generation) interface with flatbuffers encoding. As a first step in this project, the source code for Chronik has been open-sourced, and is available at Github.

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Having two separate executables works well in practice, but in discussions with the ABC team leading up to this proposal, RaiPay and ABC decided that it would be best to include Chronik directly into the eCash node (bitcoind) as one executable. This will make Chronik much more robust, eliminating the need to maintain state in both bitcoind and Chronik separately. This will also make the user experience simpler and less error-prone, having to run only bitcoind rather than juggling two executables. This project finds development work to make this integration happen.

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The development work for the project will also add first-class Avalanche support to Chronik, and make the indexing of new protocols as easy as possible.

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Work has already begun on porting Cashtab to use Chronik as its indexer. “Chronik will dramatically increase the speed of Cashtab and also make it easier for developers to rapidly deploy their own eCash apps. Native websocket support will enable instant transaction processing for web and mobile apps.” said Joey King, lead developer of Cashtab.

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What does “Chronik” mean?

The name “Chronik” was chosen because it is quite easy to pronounce, relatively unused in computer science and especially in blockchain. “Chronik” is German and translates to “History” or “Chronicle”. Since an indexer does exactly what a chronicle does—it arranges the history of a blockchain in an easy to use format—it is the perfect name for the project.

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About eCash

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eCash is redefining wealth and re-introducing the idea of electronic cash to the crypto space. Now on over 30+ exchanges with the ticker XEC, eCash is making waves through each approved project, step by step, to reinvest and grow its ecosystem. For more information check out https://e.cash/.

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