Cardano APIs

This document lists some useful tools/repositories that could be used by a Mithril node to retrieve information about the chain

• cardano-node is the core component that talks to peers in the Cardano network, retrieves blocks and txs. Running a Cardano node is easy enough as there are prebuilt binaries and docker images available, what might be trickier is to configure a node esp. for testing purpose. Perhaps this code could help: It's an implementation in Haskell of a 3-nodes cardano cluster, that should make it "easy" to test the rest of the stack
• cardano-db-sync is a tool that keeps a PostgreSQL database in sync with a cardano network, interacting with a cardano-node to retrieve informations about the current state of the system That's probably what one should use to retrieve a UTXO set at some point in time. In particular, there's this example query which seems promising
• Mantis and Scorex are tools written in Scala to interact or build a blockchain. Not sure how useful this could be as the Mithril nodes will really just be talking to each others and exchanging messages unrelated to the chain itself.
• cardano-graphql is another interesting option: This project provides a GraphQL API on top of a cardano-node which might be simpler to deploy and work with than the db-sync
• Blockfrost provides a REST API on top of Cardano chain, but it's SaaS only. There are however a lot of clients available and this might be a simple option to get started.