TrueBlocks - an Ethereum index

2 minute read

Something a little surprising is the fact that running our own Ethereum node (like Erigon) is not enough for us to easily access the data.

The rpcdaemon is enough in the sense that we do get access to it but the issue is that the api isn’t. For instance, there is no way to get a list of all the transactions given an account number. To do that, we would have to walk through block by block and filtering the transactions for that particular account. Depending on our use case that’s totally fine of course. Assuming we do want an easy way to access all transactions of a given account then there is a better way. TrueBlock creates this index of accounts for us.

Installing TrueBlocks

We will follow the instruction on their main page

% go version
go version go1.19 darwin/arm64

Our version is >=1.16 ✔️

We check for the dependencies

brew install cmake ninja
brew install git
brew install clang-format
brew install jq

We get the repo from GitHub and build it

cd eth
git clone -b develop https://github.com/trueblocks/trueblocks-core
cd trueblocks-core
git checkout develop
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ../src
make

We add the bin directory to the path

PATH="/Users/leodonethat/eth/trueblocks-core/bin:${PATH}"
export PATH

By defaul, the rpc provider is our local machine in port 8045. Which is where the erigon rpcdaemon runs in my case and will be yours if you followed the same steps. In case it’s not, you have to edit the config file to add our rpc daemon. Please note adding and external provider (like Infura) might get pricey as the indexer will make many many calls.

Location: ~/Library/Application\ Support/TrueBlocks/trueBlocks.toml
Param: rpcProvider = "http://localhost:8545

Testing TrueBlocks

% chifra blocks 12345

Could not establish ts file: while calling contract: Post "http://localhost:8545": dial tcp 127.0.0.1:8545: connect: connection refused

  Warning: The RPC server (http://localhost:8545) was not found. Either start it, or edit the rpcProvider
  value in the file /Users/leodonethat/Library/Application Support/TrueBlocks/trueBlocks.toml. Quitting...

Well, I forgot to launch Erigon. Let’s do that in a different window and try again.

% cd eth/erigon
erigon % ./build/bin/erigon --datadir mainnet --http.api=eth,erigon,web3,net,debug,trace,txpool

% cd eth/trueblocks-core
trueblocks-core % chifra blocks 12345
{ "data": [
{
  "gasLimit": 5000,
  "gasUsed": 0,
  "hash": "0x767c2bfb3bdee3f78676c1285cd757bcd5d8c272cef2eb30d9733800a78c0b6d",
  "blockNumber": 12345,
  "parentHash": "0x4b3c1d7e65a507b62734feca1ee9f27a5379e318bd52ae62de7ba67dbeac66a3",
  "miner": "0xad5c1768e5974c231b2148169da064e61910f31a",
  "difficulty": 735512610763,
  "finalized": true,
  "timestamp": 1438367030,
  "baseFeePerGas": 0
}] }

Excellent!! 🥳

Once we now it’s working we go ahead and run a full index.

trueblocks-core % chifra scrape
INFO[14-11|18:08:32.876] Writing block zero allocations for 8893 allocs, nAddresses: 8893
INFO[14-11|18:08:32.901] Wrote 8893 address and 8893 appearance records to $INDEX/000000000-000000000.bin (snapped to grid)
INFO[14-11|18:08:51.775] Block=2000 have 2535 appearances of 2000000 (0.1%). Need 1997465 more. Added 2535 records (1.27 apps/blk).
INFO[14-11|18:08:56.875] Block=4000 have 4917 appearances of 2000000 (0.2%). Need 1995083 more. Added 2382 records (1.19 apps/blk).
...

Example with a known address

After that we can start playing playing with the data and get all transactions associated with an address:

% chifra export 0xab5801a7d398351b8be11c439e05c5b3259aec9b

That address has lots of transactions though so be prepared for quite a bit of data.

vb_address_transactions