5 posts tagged with "technical"

When we set out to connect Cardano to game state, we started from the obvious place: write an indexer task. Each new use-case got its own custom Carp module, its own SQL schema, its own glue code. After the third one — stake-pool delegation, projected NFTs, native-asset transfers — it was clear we'd been writing the same scaffold three times. EffectStream now ships those scaffolds as Cardano Primitives: a shared architecture that turns Dolos/UTxORPC streams into typed, queryable state machine events, with five concrete primitives delivered out of the box.

Part 1 walked through the Celestia integration as an architecture — the batcher, the funnel, the database, the demo UI. This second post is the document-the-subtleties counterpart: when should you reach for a DA layer at all? Both Avail and Celestia are first-class options in EffectStream — same primitive shape, different chains under the hood. Choosing between them, or choosing to skip the DA layer entirely, is the first design decision a team needs to make. After that, the second decision is how to index the data you posted, because a blob on a DA layer is useless to your application until something reads it back into PostgreSQL.

In Part 1 we covered how EffectStream indexes delegation changes. In Part 2 we walked through the state machine that writes delegation events to PostgreSQL. Now we'll build on that foundation: a custom Batcher that reads delegation state from the database and decides whether to accept or reject user transactions based on which pool they're delegating to.

This is the key use case for stake pool operators: free transactions for your delegators. The SPO runs a batcher that covers gas fees, but only for users delegating to their pool.

In Part 1 through Part 3 we built a stack that observes Cardano delegation — index the certificates, persist them, gate user inputs on pool membership. The application reads delegation; delegation does not read the application. There is a more ambitious place to put stake pools, though: at the consensus layer of a chain itself. That is where Midnight lives. Once you go there, "react to delegation" stops being a feature flag inside a game and starts being block production for an entire ecosystem of games.

A step-by-step walkthrough of how the EffectStream cardano-delegation template works internally. We'll trace the full path from raw Cardano blocks to application state, covering the config, primitive, grammar, state machine, database, and API layers.