InferaDB Ledger

Blockchain storage for cryptographically verifiable authorization.

Important

Under active development. Not production-ready.

InferaDB Ledger is a distributed blockchain database optimized for authorization workloads. It commits every state change cryptographically, replicates via Raft consensus, and lets clients verify independently. Ledger is the persistent storage layer used by the InferaDB Engine and InferaDB Control.

• Features
• Installation
• Quick Start
• Development
• Design
• Community
• License

Features

• Cryptographic Verification — Per-vault blockchain with chain-linked state roots, Merkle proofs, SHA-256 commitments
• Raft Consensus — Strong consistency, automatic leader election, deterministic state recovery
• Performance — Sub-millisecond reads, <50ms p99 writes, bucket-based O(k) state roots, batched transactions
• Multi-Tenancy — Namespace isolation, multiple vaults per namespace, shard groups for scaling
• Storage — Embedded ACID database, hybrid K/V + merkle architecture, tiered snapshots

Installation

Configuration

CLI	Purpose	Default
--listen	Bind address for gRPC API	127.0.0.1:50051
--data	Persistent storage (logs, state, snapshots)	(ephemeral)
--single	Development or single-server deployment (details)
--join	Add this server to an existing cluster (details)
--cluster	Start a new N-node cluster (details)	3
--peers	How to find other nodes: DNS domain or file path	(disabled)

See Configuration Reference for environment variables and all options including metrics, batching, and tuning.

Quick Start

Development or single-server deployment:

inferadb-ledger --data /var/lib/ledger --single

Production cluster (run on each of 3 nodes):

inferadb-ledger --data /var/lib/ledger --cluster 3 --peers ledger.example.com

For clusters, --peers tells each node how to find the others. The format is auto-detected:

• DNS domain (e.g., ledger.example.com) — looks up A records
• File path (e.g., /var/lib/ledger/peers.json) — reads addresses from JSON

See the deployment guide for multi-node setup, Kubernetes, adding/removing nodes, backup, and recovery.

Development

Prerequisites

• Rust 1.92+
• mise for synchronized development tooling
• just for convenient development commands

Build and Test

git clone https://github.com/inferadb/ledger.git
cd ledger

# Install development tools
mise trust && mise install

# Build
just build

# Run tests
just test

Design

See DESIGN.md for details on block structure, state root computation, ID generation, historical reads, multi-vault isolation, and shard group scaling.

Community

Join us on Discord for questions and discussions.

License

Dual-licensed under MIT or Apache 2.0.