Nodecore

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What is Nodecore

nodecore is a fault-tolerant RPC load balancer designed to work with any blockchain API. It intelligently distributes requests across multiple providers or nodes, with a focus on optimizing performance metrics such as latency, throughput, and error rates.

⚠️ Project status: nodecore is still under active development. Expect frequent updates and improvements as the project evolves.

Key features

• Intelligent routing: dynamically selects the most suitable upstream based on real-time performance metrics (latency, error rate, availability). This ensures optimal speed, reliability, and fault-tolerance
• Multi-protocol RPC support:
  • EVM and Solana JSON-RPC over HTTP and WebSocket
    • Supports all standard EVM and Solana RPC methods
    • Handles EVM filter methods (eth_newFilter, eth_getFilterLogs, etc.) by routing them only to the upstream where the filter was created
    • Supports all EVM and Solana subscription types
  • All methods and their settings are defined in the method specs
  • Unsupported methods are automatically banned per upstream to prevent unnecessary requests
  • Planned support for additional networks and protocols (REST, gRPC, etc.)
• Efficient cache system: Minimizes redundant traffic by caching frequent requests and reducing load on upstream providers
• Customizable selection policies: Offers flexible configuration for defining custom provider selection logic based on specific metrics and preferences
• Streaming-first architecture: Responses can be streamed to minimize memory footprint and handle large payloads efficiently
• Failsafe mechanisms: Built-in resilience features to ensure continuity under failure conditions, such as:
  • Request hedging – duplicate requests to multiple upstreams to mitigate slow responses
  • Automatic retries – configurable retries for failed requests
• Flexible authentication: Supports multiple authentication strategies, such as:
  • Token-based and JWT authentication for standard access control
  • Scoped access keys with fine-grained restrictions, such as IP whitelists, method whitelists, and contract address whitelists — allowing tighter limits per application

Quick start

Use docker run -p 9090:9090 -v /path/to/config:/nodecore.yml drpcorg/nodecore.

Build from source

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/drpcorg/nodecore.git

2. Install Go dependencies:

make setup

3. Create your own configuration file. Use ./nodecore.yml as a template. Replace the example URLs with your own upstream providers.

4. Run with docker:

   • Build the image docker build -t nodecore:latest .
   • Run the container with your local config docker run -v ${/path/to/config}/nodecore-local.yml:./nodecore-local.yml nodecore:latest

5. Run locally:

   • Generate chain info based on the public repo https://github.com/drpcorg/public make generate-networks
   • Start the service make run. Note: it will use the basic config file ./nodecore.yml. If you want to specify your own one, run the following command: NODECORE_CONFIG_PATH=/path/to/your/config make run

6. Send you first request:

curl --location 'http://localhost:9090/queries/ethereum' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data '{
    "id": 1,
    "jsonrpc": "2.0",
    "method": "eth_getBlockByNumber",
    "params": [
        "latest",
        false
    ]
}'

Documentation

For detailed documentation see

Special Deployments

Running NodeCore as a Tor Hidden Service

NodeCore can be deployed as a Tor hidden service (.onion) to provide anonymous and censorship-resistant access to blockchain RPC endpoints.

Quick start with Tor:

docker-compose -f docker-compose.tor.yml up -d
cat tor-data/hostname  # Get your .onion address

For complete setup instructions, security considerations, and troubleshooting, see:

• Tor Setup Guide

Nodecore Helm Chart

The Helm chart and instructions for deploying nodecore to Kubernetes are located in chart/nodecore in this repository and are published as an OCI artifact to the GitHub Container Registry (GHCR).