Ethereum is proudly known for its diversity of full node implementations that maintain network state, uphold protocol rules and provide their users a gateway into the world of web3. Diversity makes sure that network only works as intended, and according to protocol, not certain bugs in a single codebase.

Today we are proud to present the preview of new addition to this fine family: Akula.

True innovation meets systems language

Akula grew out of an internal project in Erigon team, where it was originally conceived as a database access library. If you haven’t read about Erigon yet, you definitely should check out this blog post, which describes how this performant beast of a node lets users get full validation archive on consumer hardware. Consequently, all Erigon’s data model innovations and ideas went into design of Akula as well: flat state, usage of MDBX storage engine, outside preprocessing - all to lower disk footprint and reduce read-write amplification.

On top of this, Akula is written in Rust, fast, elegant and safe systems programming language, which keeps a whole class of memory and concurrency bugs at bay. Akula leverages a new Rust EVM interpreter evmodin, specifically designed to allow for asynchronous state access.

All of this enables the new standard of performance, not seen in full nodes before.

Erigon and Akula benchmark, courtesy of Paolo Rebuffo

Erigon and Akula benchmark, courtesy of Paolo Rebuffo

Akula beats already fast Erigon by 1.5-2 times on execution performance. Without building additional indexes, we are looking at full validation of Ethereum mainnet from genesis in under 24h.

WIP, but already works

Akula is available on GitHub: akula-bft/akula

In the coming weeks we should gain working download of blocks and headers over devp2p as well as minimal Web3 API. However, Akula can already be run today, as companion node connected to Erigon’s database, as both a preview of what’s to come and additional verification of Erigon’s execution.

Please join #akula channel on Erigon Discord or @akula_bft group on Telegram if you have any questions about Akula or would like to help with testing and development.

We wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, and hope that 2022 will bring about even more decentralized Ethereum with Akula enabling it even more.