EOSphere - EOS History Services

"... we are happy to announce that we are running a Light History EOS Service accessible through intelligent routing via our normal API nodes."

EOS History generally refers to the record of transactions on the blockchain, even though almost every node on the network has a complete record of all these transactions in a block.log they are not immediately viewable for users, dApps or wallet applications until they have been imported into a referenceable database.

Being able to view historical transactions is considered an important feature for certain blockchain applications and so when block.one released EOSIO they included the history_plugin for nodeos that was referenceable via a history_api.. however, this plugin was soon depreciated after launch in EOSIO v1.2.0 without the provision of a replacement.

The Legacy History Service, now referred to as Classic History is not optimised, it is very disk IO intensive as well as consumes an excessively large amount of disk space. Most technically focused EOS Block Producers continued to run the legacy history plugin after v1.2.0 on limited disk infrastructure for as long as possible by removing certain types of transactions from the record, ultimately most were unable to provide an effective history service and the entire EOS network was reliant on 1 – 2 Block Producers for Full History.

Much has happened over the last few months with numerous Full History options becoming available to replace the Classic History Service;

EOS Canada dfuse
EOS Tribe Elastic Search
Crypto Lions MongoDB API (Only recently depreciated)
EOSRIO Hyperion
cc32d9 EOS Chronicle Project
Atticlab Scylladb / Apache Cassandra

block.one have also provided a new plugin called state_history created by Todd Fleming which allows external processes access to EOSIO transaction history although not directly referenceable. This plugin is used by most of the replacement services above.

(If you have an alternative solution and have been left out please let us know)

Even though these new options exist and are currently being further developed, there is still an interim requirement for the resource intensive EOS Classic History API services. We are currently aware of 2 Block Producers providing Full EOS History via the Classic History API namely;

EOS sw/eden (https://eossweden.org/)
Grey|Mass ( https://greymass.com/)

There has been discussion on who’s responsibility providing referenceable history services on the EOS network where some believe it is the Block Producers responsibility and others that dApps need to provide their own transaction records. Ultimately, we believe that history services should be shared between dApps and Block Producers with a balance being found between service requirements and infrastructure / services cost between the two entities.

Currently as EOS Standby Block Producers, we see one of our base responsibilities as providing quality infrastructure services within our means to the EOS network. With this in mind we are happy to announce that we are running a Light History EOS Service accessible through intelligent routing via our normal API nodes.

Light History created by Grey|Mass is a modified history_plugin based on Classic History that enables a retention policy for actions and traces. In our current highly available deployment, we retain a rolling record of the latest 500 transactions for every EOS account. This certainly seems to cover the majority of general transaction queries requested of our API nodes, if any older transactions are requested our API will then forward to the EOS sw/eden or Grey|Mass Full History Services.

The benefit of running Light History in our Sydney Data Centres is a reduced load on the currently only 2 Classic History Full Nodes on the EOS network and low latency for history queries in the Oceania Region.

We have also been experimenting with the EOSRIO Hyperion Solution and expect to be offering this service in the near future to ultimately replace Classic History in it’s entirety.

EOSphere are a passionate group of EOS enthusiasts and data centre professionals currently Standby Block Producers providing services for the EOS Mainnet and Block Production services across multiple sister chains.

Based in Australia, EOSphere are focussed on supporting the EOS community and serving the entire EOSphere through provision of infrastructure, governance and community benefit initiatives.