§ Verana Indexer Specification

Specification Status: Pre-Draft

Latest Draft: verana-labs/verana-indexer-spec

Editors:: Fabrice Rochette (The Verana Foundation, 2060.io)

Participate:: GitHub repo; File a bug; Commit history

§ About this Document

This specification is for the Verana Indexer, a container-based App easily deployable locally, or in any modern cloud infrastructure.

§ Introduction

This section is non-normative.

§ Why We Need the Verana Indexer

Ledger Storage Is Expensive
- Every on-chain byte costs gas or block space.
- To keep fees low, a VPR stores only the minimum viable record (IDs, hashes, pointers, values).
Limited Native Indexing
- Blockchains are append-only logs, not SQL engines.
- Adding many on-chain indexes would explode storage costs and slow consensus.
Query Complexity
- Wallets and services still need fast look-ups:
  - Is this credential issued by an authorized issuer?
  - Which credential schema contains the word “name”?
- Without an indexer, you’d have to scan the entire chain for each query, which is costly and impractical.
Trust Resolution
- Trust-resolving a DID with the [Verre] library takes some time.
- Data stored in credentials is not present in the ledger.
- Without the indexer, it would not be possible to search credential attributes.

§ 🔧 Enter the Verana Indexer

Feature	Purpose
Ledger Listener	Subscribes to new blocks & events.
Selective Ingest	Index only new information or modified information.
Off-Chain Database	Builds optimized tables & secondary indexes.
Real-Time Updates	Each ledger transaction triggers an index refresh, keeping data in sync.
Lightweight Container	Runs anywhere: validator nodes, cloud, or self-hosted.

With the Verana Indexer, the ledger stays lean, yet wallets, verifiers, and dashboards get millisecond-fast queries. It marries on-chain integrity with off-chain speed, and makes every credential uncovered during trust resolution instantly searchable.

§ Terminology

TBW

§ Specification

§ [GENERAL] General

The Verana Indexer MUST be delivered as a container.

§ [GENERAL-DEPLOYMENT] General - Deployment

[GENERAL-DEPLOYMENT-HUB] Container MUST be versioned and deployed to docker hub.
[GENERAL-DEPLOYMENT-DOCKER] Documentation for running the container with docker MUST be provided.
[GENERAL-DEPLOYMENT-KUBE] Documentation for deploying the container in Kubernetes MUST be provided.
[GENERAL-DEPLOYMENT-HELM] Verana Indexer MUST be installable in Kubernetes by using helm install. Documentation MUST be provided.
[GENERAL-DEPLOYMENT-LAMBDA] Verana Indexer MUST be runnable in Amazon Lambda. Documentation MUST be provided.

§ [GENERAL-ENV] General - Container Variables

Type	Variable	Default Value (if unspecified)
Network Configuration	API_ENDPOINT	https://api.verana.network
	RPC_ENDPOINT	https://rpc.verana.network
	CHAIN_ID	vna-mainnet-1
	NETWORK_NAME	Mainnet