Author: Nadav Ivgi 2020-06-01 08:10:50
Published on: 2020-06-01T08:10:50+00:00
Nadav Ivgi has released a new HD wallet indexer, bwt, which is similar to Electrum Personal Server and provides additional indexes on top of the bitcoind wallet functionality. Bwt can query the Electrum RPC protocol and uses a modern HTTP REST API for app developers. The design is aimed at tracking an xpub and automatically deriving new addresses as needed, according to the gap limit. Compared to using the bitcoind RPC directly, bwt provides real-time updates via Server-Sent Events or Web Hooks. The indexer is designed in a way that minimizes RPC requests to bitcoind. One major item on the roadmap that Nadav hopes to tackle soon is support for output script descriptors. Esplora-electrs and bwt are compared by Antoine, who asked how they compare performance-wise. Both APIs are designed by Nadav and have similarities. Although it's difficult to compare their performance directly, esplora-electrs keeps a full index of everything, while bwt tracks wallet addresses only. If the user is only interested in wallet addresses and doesn't have a huge number of them, bwt will perform better. But if there are a lot of addresses, esplora-electrs will be better suited for the job. Esplora provides all the information one might want to know about transactions/blocks, while bwt intentionally reduces this to the subset useful in the context of app development. Bwt provides wallet-contextual information, like key origins next to addresses and the net change inflicted on the wallet's balance by transactions. Esplora doesn't provide real-time updates yet, while bwt provides them using two different mechanisms (SSE and Web Hooks).
Updated on: 2023-05-20T23:21:15.090697+00:00