Hoarding Node

Hoarding Node is a Cardano network monitoring node that preserves data usually lost in normal operation: orphaned blocks, invalid blocks, rollback traces, and related propagation metadata. The goal is to support incident response, debugging, and empirical analysis of real network behavior without relying on voluntary reporting.

What It Does

• Connects to peers like a normal relay and continuously collects headers and blocks.
• Persists observed data with source and timing metadata for later investigation.
• Tracks peer discovery and connection lifecycle to improve network coverage over time.
• Exposes an API and Prometheus-compatible metrics for observability and automation.

Technical Approach

• Peer discovery and expansion: Starts from configured bootstrap peers, then uses PeerSharing to discover more peers recursively.
• Collector model: Runs per-peer collectors with retry cooldowns and failure tracking to avoid tight reconnect loops.
• Storage model: Separates content deduplication (unique block/tx by hash) from source tracking (which peer sent what and when).
• Monitoring-first operations: Includes built-in metrics for protocol activity, database performance, node health, and runtime behavior.

Why It Matters

Cardano nodes intentionally do not retain all non-canonical network data. Hoarding Node fills that gap by capturing best-effort evidence of unusual or adversarial behavior, including equivocation, induced rollbacks, and expensive or invalid data propagation. This improves debugging, post-incident forensics, and ecosystem-wide operational insight.