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Overview

The Voi blockchain, like every blockchain is underpinned by a network of nodes.

A node is a piece of software that runs on a device with sufficient resources, the correct environment and a connection to the internet. It’s these independent nodes communicating with each other that enables the blockchain to operate.

This software can be configured in different ways depending on what you want the node to do. The configuration of the software will also dictate the resources required for the software to run effectively.

Some common configurations are:

  • Participation
  • Relay
  • Lite
  • Archival

Participation Nodes

Participation nodes are the nodes that participate in consensus and that transactions are submitted from. These are the nodes that accounts are staked on and they store the last 1000 blocks of the ledger.

Relay Nodes

Relay nodes are used for routing messages between other node types.

Lite Nodes

Lite nodes can be used to submit transactions to the network or access non-historical states.

Archival Nodes

Archival nodes store the entire ledger, as such they may also have the indexer software installed on the node as well to more efficiently and effectively query the ledger.