FAQs
What is Amaru?
Amaru is a Cardano node implementation written in Rust, designed to be modular, resource-efficient, and fully compatible with the Cardano protocol. It re-implements the core components of the existing Haskell node — ledger, consensus, networking — with a focus on memory safety, observability, and maintainability.
Who is building Amaru?
Amaru is developed by PRAGMA, a consortium of Cardano ecosystem builders that includes independent engineering teams and ecosystem contributors. The Cardano Foundation and Sundae Labs are the two primary contributors to Amaru.
How is Amaru designed?
Amaru follows a layered and modular architecture, with separate layers for:
- • Networking (P2P protocol, relay, gossip)
- • Consensus (Ouroboros implementation)
- • Ledger (Cardano ledger rules and state transitions)
- • Plutus (Smart contracts virtual machine)
- • Storage (RocksDB-backed, designed for incremental sync and efficient pruning)
- • Observability (structured JSON logs and OpenTelemetry tracing)
Each subsystem comes also as a Rust library, providing clear interfaces and making Amaru a toolkit as much as a node.
What makes Amaru different from the Haskell node?
Key differences include:
- • Efficiency: we currently recommend 2 GB of RAM, instead of the 24 GB recommended by the official documentation of the Haskell node.
- • User experience: easier onboarding for developers and operators alike.
- • Observability: first-class tracing and JSON logging via OpenTelemetry.
- • Portability: targets a variety of platforms and architectures (e.g. ARM, RISC-V, WASM).
- • Modularity: components (e.g. ledger, consensus) can evolve independently, and are usable as Rust libraries to build new use cases on Cardano.
- • Robustness: Amaru aims to raise Cardano’s development standards with whitehacking, robust testing and end-to-end engineering processes.
Why is Amaru open source?
Because we believe building on Cardano should be accessible to everyone and easy. We want Amaru to have explicit and useful documentation in all aspects of the project, and to make Cardano simple to use.
Amaru is released under the Apache 2.0 licence.