533 commits, 181,000 lines of Rust, and more than a few humbling encounters with the Cardano protocol. Here's what we've learned building Torsten — a from-scratch Cardano node — and the bugs, breakthroughs, and hard-won lessons along the way.
We built an MCP server that connects Claude and other LLMs to the Koios API — 95 tools covering every corner of the Cardano blockchain, from UTxO lookups to governance proposals.
Sandstone is building Torsten — a Rust implementation of a Cardano full node targeting 100% compatibility with the Haskell reference implementation, with significant performance benefits. Here's an overview of the project and where it stands today.
A comprehensive technical exploration of the cardano-node repository and the wider Cardano software stack — architecture, era system, companion repositories, the Haskell trade-offs, and the engineering that keeps the network running.