bdk_floresta

bdk_floresta is a Floresta-powered chain-source crate for BDK.

This crate implements a BDK [Wallet] tightly coupled to Floresta, a lightweight, fully-validating Bitcoin client that leverages Utreexo.

Instead of relying on external and possibly untrusted chain oracles, such as an Esplora or Electrum server controled by a third-party, you are now able to be your own chain oracle, doing block and trasaction validation, transaction broadcasting, and querying blockchain data in a completely local and trustless manner. The privacy improvements are huge, since you don't need to trust a third-party to provide you with the truth, while also making transaction behavior and IP address correlation pretty much impossible.

All of this is made possible by Utreexo, a hash-based accumulator for the Bitcoin UTXO set. It allows representing the UTXO set in it's entirety in under 1KB. This way, running fully-validating clients on devices with reduced and low-performance storage, such as mobile phones, becomes feasible, as the biggest bottleneck during IBD is not due to a lack of CPU power; it's actually caused by slow disk I/O during lookups in the UTXO set database (especially on spinning drives, which have poor performance on non-linear reads), which the Utreexo accumulator does not keep at all. Instead, it maintains a compact representation of it, and relies on Merkle inclusion proofs of each UTXO being spent in order to verify that they belong to the UTXO set. These proofs must be kept by whoever controls those UTXOs, which are then attached to the transaction before being sent to another Utreexo peer over the P2P network.

If you wan't to learn more, refer to A Treatise on Utreexo, my blog post on the topic.

Also refer to the more complete documentation under docs/, which go in depth on this crate's architecture and Utreexo concepts.