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Architecture

Koinos separates consensus, storage, networking, indexing, and public APIs into cooperating services. Smart contracts provide application logic and can also replace selected protocol behavior through the system-call architecture.

This chapter explains those boundaries and the consistency rules between them. For commands and production procedures, use Node Operators. For contract development, use Smart Contract Development.

  • Microservices


    Understand the services inside a Koinos node, which service owns each kind of state, and how optional API and index services extend the core node.

    Explore the node

  • Internal messaging


    See how protobuf RPC requests and broadcasts move through RabbitMQ, and why this internal bus is different from the peer-to-peer network.

    Follow a message

  • Smart contract execution


    Learn how Chain executes WebAssembly contracts, separates read-only calls from transactions, records state, and emits events.

    Enter the runtime

  • ABI and serialization


    Understand how an ABI describes contract entry points and how Protocol Buffers encode data across APIs, services, transactions, and contracts.

    Understand the data

  • System calls


    Learn how contracts access blockchain capabilities and how system contracts can replace selected native behavior without changing the node executable.

    Cross the runtime boundary

  • Resource model


    See how Koinos measures compute, network bandwidth, and disk storage and charges those resources in Resource Credits instead of conventional gas fees.

    Follow resource accounting

  • Proof of Burn


    Understand the relationship between KOIN, Virtual Hash Power, block production eligibility, and the VHP consumed during production.

    Understand consensus

Source baseline

The service architecture in this chapter follows the version set declared by the official Koinos deployment bundle at commit 821674672e699bf56e94d7c0e8bce122e83d1482. RPC and broadcast definitions use koinos-proto v2.6.0. Versioned links on each page identify the implementation inspected for that explanation.