Akula: the fastest Ethereum node ever built

Akula is a next-generation implementation of Ethereum protocol (“client”) written in Rust.

Akula (Акула) is pronounced as ah-koo-lah and stands for shark in Russian.

Key benefits:

Much lower disk footprint: <3TB for Ethereum mainnet archive node

Faster sync speed:

• An archive full validation node can be bootstrapped in under 3 days.
• Performance improvements allow to run even on HDD.

Crash resilience:

• Forceful shutdown or power failure cannot damage Akula’s database.

Extremely fast and rich historical state API:

• eth_call and Parity Trace API implemented
• Out-of-the-box support for Otterscan: very-fast and privacy-friendly local block explorer.

gRPC alternative to web3 JSONRPC API

Here is how fast execution is: look at Mgas/s.

Network & consensus engine support

Akula supports the following networks out of the box:

• Ethereum (“mainnet”) *
• Sepolia *
• Goerli * — deprecated, the network was shut down in 2024
• Ropsten * — deprecated, the network was shut down in 2022
• Rinkeby — deprecated, the network was shut down in 2023

Newer test networks (Holesky, Hoodi) are not supported: they were launched after Akula’s last release, so no chain specification for them ships with the client.

Additionally, users can join any other network, provided their own chain specification file, and if the network uses any of the following consensus engines:

• Ethash
• Ethereum beacon chain consensus *
• Clique

Akula does not support any other EVM-based or EVM-like networks except as listed here.

[*] Requires running Lighthouse node instance pointed to Akula’s engine API RPC endpoint