ElectrumSV Reference Server

Detailed API documentation can be found here

Licence: The Open BSV License
Maintainers: Roger Taylor, AustEcon
Project Lead: Roger Taylor
Homepage: https://electrumsv.io/

Overview

The motivation for this project is to provide access to the APIs that ElectrumSV needs moving into the future where things like managing peer channels and accessing useful blockchain data is part of day to day Bitcoin usage. The APIs we need are as yet not available anywhere else.

It is envisioned that users can adapt this project and run their own server to provide some of these APIs for their own use. Businesses can also adapt or use it as a reference for ensuring compatibility, and host APIs for any interested users.

Note that implementations for all APIs are not provided. The blockchain data access will not be able to be hosted by users. As block sizes increase developing and running a server to process the mempool, new blocks and extract blockchain data of interest will become more and work. This is something that will likely only be done by businesses that invest in both the work and maintenance required.

What follows is a high-level overview of the different API subsections. More detailed documentation of how to use each endpoint will be hosted on our swagger API page.

Endpoint Discovery & Account management (Built-in)

Users of this service will need to open a micropayment channel (or use an alternative payment modality) to make pro-rata payments for their consumption of this service. Upon account creation, a "Master Bearer Token" will be issued which grants access to any of the other endpoints and trumps the access privileges of any other Bearer Tokens (for example the ones generated for each Peer Channel that is created).

Endpoint	Method	Auth?	Description
/api/v1/endpoints	GET	No	Retrieves the metadata about the supported APIs
/api/v1/account	GET	Yes	Return account information
/api/v1/account/key	POST	Special	Post keys and create an account

Peer Channel API (Built-in)

This is a Python implementation of C#/ASP.NET Core reference implementation reference implementation & the brfc specification for it. The API is virtually identical except that the channel management APIs use the "Master Bearer Token" for authorization (see: Account management APIs above) rather than what the reference Peer Channels implementation does which is to use Basic Auth & an account_id in the url path. Beyond this slight change to the url paths and the authorization universally using Bearer Tokens, there is no material difference.

Channel Management APIs

All of these APIs require the "Master Bearer Token" for access (see previous: Account management).

Endpoint	Method	Auth?	Description
/api/v1/channel/manage/list	GET	Yes	List all Peer Channels
/api/v1/channel/manage/{channelid}	GET	Yes	Get single channel details
/api/v1/channel/manage/{channelid}	POST	Yes	Update single channel details
/api/v1/channel/manage/{channelid}	DELETE	Yes	Delete a channel
/api/v1/channel/manage/	POST	Yes	Create a new Peer Channel
/api/v1/channel/manage/{channelid}/api-token/{tokenid}	GET	Yes	Get token details
/api/v1/channel/manage/{channelid}/api-token/{tokenid}	DELETE	Yes	Revoke selected token
/api/v1/channel/manage/{channelid}/api-token	GET	Yes	Get a list of tokens for the selected channel
/api/v1/channel/manage/{channelid}/api-token	POST	Yes	Create a new token for the selected channel

Message Management APIs

For the message management APIs, there are two classes of Bearer token that can be used:

• The "Master Bearer Token" - grants all access privileges to any channel
• The standard, peer-channel, Bearer Token that was issued at the time of channel creation (subsequently generated tokens also fall into this category and may be for read-only access)

Endpoint	Method	Auth?	Description
/api/v1/channel/{channelid}	POST	Yes	Write message to channel
/api/v1/channel/{channelid}	HEAD	Yes	Get max sequence number of channel
/api/v1/channel/{channelid}	GET	Yes	Get messages from channel
/api/v1/channel/{channelid}/{sequence}	POST	Yes	Mark messages as read or unread
/api/v1/channel/{channelid}/{sequence}	DELETE	Yes	Delete messages from channel
/api/v1/channel/{channelid}/notify	GET	Yes	Subscribe to websocket notifications for new messages

Header API (Optional)

These endpoints will become activated if there is a running instance of HeaderSV and the system administrator has set these environment variables:

EXPOSE_HEADER_SV_APIS=1
HEADER_SV_URL=http://localhost:33444

These environment variables will essentially cause ElectrumSV-Reference-Server to act as a secure reverse proxy for HeaderSV APIs. The .env file at the top-level of this repository is the default location for loading environment variables at startup from file.

Endpoint	Method	Auth?	Description
/api/v1/headers/{hash}	GET	No	Get a single raw block header by hash
/api/v1/headers/by-height/?height=<height>&count=<count>	GET	No	Get a batch of headers by height & count
/api/v1/headers/tips/websocket	GET	No	Get chain tips
/api/v1/headers/tips	GET	No	Subscribe to websocket notifications of the new chain tip

Indexer API (Provide your own implementation)

As mentioned above the work involved in implementing the support required to provide this API is prohibitive and only likely to be done by businesses. The ElectrumSV project has many other focuses and no interest whatsoever on provided an implementation that can be used anywhere other than on a local temporary development Regtest network.

These endpoints will become activated if there is a running instance of a service that provides the indexing APIs, which will be mirrored and authenticated by the reference server. The system administrator must set these environment variables:

EXPOSE_INDEXER_APIS=1
INDEXER_URL=http://127.0.0.1:49241

Endpoint	Method	Auth?	Description
/api/v1/restoration/search	POST	Yes	Locate pushdata usage in the fixed height restoration index.
/api/v1/transaction/filter	GET	Yes	Read the currently registered pushdata hash filtering registrations.
/api/v1/transaction/filter	POST	Yes	Request new pushdata hash filtering registrations.
/api/v1/transaction/filter:delete	POST	Yes	Delete selected current registered pushdata hash filtering registrations.
/api/v1/transaction/{txid}	GET	Yes	Get the given transaction.
/api/v1/merkle-proof/{txid}	GET	Yes	Get the merkle proof for a given transaction.
/api/v1/output-spend	POST	Yes	Get the state of given UTXOs, whether in mempool or mined.
/api/v1/output-spend/notifications	POST	Yes	Register the given UTXOs to notify if they are spent returning any existing state

A very simple implementation of these APIs for the Regtest network is provided in the form of the ElectrumSV Simple Indexer project. This is used for development of ElectrumSV projects and also to serve as an illustration of what third parties need to do at a very simplistic level to develop their own implementations that can work on networks like Testnet, Mainnet and Scaling Testnet.

Pro-Rata Payment Protocol

This is a work in progress

Inclusion in the SDK

This server will be included in the ElectrumSV SDK which aims to provide a first-class RegTest developer experience. This is by providing a quick-launch toolkit for running services against a RegTest node.

Running The ElectrumSV Reference Server

On windows (requires Python 3.10):

# Python packages
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Run the server
py server.py

On unix (requires Python 3.10):

# System Dependencies
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev libudev-dev
python3.10 -m pip install -U pysqlite3-binary
python3.10 -c "import pysqlite3; print(pysqlite3.sqlite_version)"

# Python packages
python3.10 -m pip3 install -r requirements.txt

# Run the server
python3.10 server.py