Fork and reorg watch

Status on blockspacelabs.com: Research.

What it studies #

The Labs site describes it as a study that "detects indexers that follow a stale tip or a fork, from our experience with an atomicals indexer stuck on an orphan at block 966,500."

An indexer reads every block and builds its own view of a protocol. In a reorg, a competing chain replaces recent blocks, and a replaced block becomes an orphan. An indexer that does not follow the reorg keeps building on the orphan: its height can look current while its view has left the chain the node follows.

That happened to the atomicals indexer, which serves ARC-20: it stayed on an orphan at block 966,500. The study turns that lesson into a check.

The data it will use #

"Indexer cursors against bitcoind": compare the height and block each indexer says it has reached with the chain the Bitcoin node follows. A cursor whose block is not on the node's chain marks an indexer on a fork. block.space already publishes the cursors of BTI's three tiers beside the chain tip; the frontier page explains them.

Where it stands #

It is a descriptive card: it says what the check is and what it would compare. No watch is built yet and no results are claimed.

Related #

• blockspacelabs.com
• The frontier and "as of block H"
• BTI, the Blockspace Token Indexer
• reorg
• indexer
• ARC-20

Sources #

1. The blockspacelabs.com page (index.html) · blockspacelabs.com
2. block.space frontier API (the three tier cursors and the chain tip) · block.space/api/frontier
3. Blockspace Holdings records