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

Installation

NOTE: Unix-only

Akula only runs on Unix-based platforms (Linux, macOS). Do not expect any help for issues on Windows.

Docker (recommended)

A prebuilt image is available on Docker Hub:

docker pull vorot93/akula:latest

This image (linux/amd64, ~288 MB) was published on 2022-11-30 and is currently the only ready-to-run build of Akula.

Building from source

Requirements:

libclang-dev
pkg-config

Install rustup from rustup.rs.

git clone https://github.com/akula-bft/akula

cd akula

cargo build --all --profile=production

You can find built binaries in target/production folder.

Known issue: source builds currently fail

cargo build does not complete on a fresh checkout. Cargo.toml pins several dependencies to forked git repositories that are no longer published, so the build stops at dependency resolution:

error: failed to load source for dependency `arrayvec`
Caused by:
  Unable to update https://github.com/vorot93/arrayvec?branch=pop-unchecked#9e430a94
Caused by:
  revision 9e430a94359435dfe8e21467f160708ebcc01226 not found

Fixing this means repointing each dead git dependency in Cargo.toml at an available crate or mirror. Until that work is done, use the Docker image above.

Running

akula is the main binary that runs as full node:

akula --datadir=<path to Akula database directory>

For Beacon-based networks (Ethereum, Sepolia, Goerli) you also need to run Lighthouse:

git clone https://github.com/sigp/lighthouse

cargo run --release --bin lighthouse -- beacon_node --execution-endpoints=http://127.0.0.1:8551 --execution-jwt=<path to Akula database directory>/jwt.hex --checkpoint-sync-url="https://mainnet.checkpoint.sigp.io" --purge-db

akula-rpc is the RPC daemon, which can provide JSONRPC and gRPC endpoints based on Akula’s database.
akula-sentry is the P2P node.
akula-toolbox provides various helper commands to check and manipulate Akula’s database. Please consult its help for more info: