Keyboard shortcuts

Press ← or → to navigate between chapters

Press S or / to search in the book

Press ? to show this help

Press Esc to hide this help

Crate: kinetic-node

Stage: 12

Reading Time: 40 mins

Depends On: kinetic-core, kinetic-network, kinetic-storage

What Is This?

kinetic-node is the infrastructure node binary. It is explicitly NOT the user-facing daemon (kinetic-daemon).

The critical difference:

TargetDescription
kinetic-daemon= runs on a user’s laptop, exposes full HTTP API, PAC proxy, DNS resolver, local CA. Designed for interactive use.
kinetic-node= runs on a server 24/7, no HTTP API, no DNS, no proxy. Its only job is to be a stable, always-on DHT participant so new peers have someone to bootstrap against.

Important

Infrastructure nodes are the backbone that makes the network not collapse when all personal laptops are offline.

What Makes It Unique vs The Daemon

  1. Static Ed25519 identity — The daemon generates ephemeral keys. The node loads a persistent keypair from node.key on disk so its Peer ID never changes across restarts. Stable Peer IDs are required for DHT bootstrap nodes.
  2. NetworkMode::FullNode — Listens on 0.0.0.0 (all interfaces) on both TCP and QUIC, binding to the wider internet. The daemon also binds to all interfaces (0.0.0.0) when running as a FullNode.
  3. No user-facing services — No HTTP API for publishing names, no DNS resolver, no PAC server, no local CA. Purely P2P.
  4. Minimal health-check API — One tiny Axum router at port 16003 with just /health and /peer_id. That’s it.
  5. Governance gossip relay — Processes and persists governance state changes received over P2P gossip, including writing NameRecord::Premium entries directly to Sled when a premium name grant is approved.

Warning

6. Governance key validation at boot — Immediately exits if production governance keys aren’t initialized, refusing to run in an insecure configuration.

Files

  • 02_main.md — Boot sequence, Drand heartbeat, governance gossip loop, network wiring.
  • 03_identity.md — Static key loading/generation with atomic disk write and full test coverage.
  • 04_gossip.md — Governance gossip message handler and storage effect processor.
  • 05_api.md — The minimal health-check API.