Integration Guide

This guide is for helping developers integrating Ergo into exchanges, wallets, pools wallets etc.

Introduction

Some quick facts useful for an integration:

• like Bitcoin, a transaction in Ergo has multiple inputs and outputs. Unspent outputs are single-use entities. However, Ergo is built from scratch thus scripts and transaction format are different.
• like in Bitcoin, there are some standard scripts in Ergo associated with addresses, e.g. P2PK addresses. There's an article on address scheme available: https://ergoplatform.org/en/blog/2019_07_24_ergo_address/
• Ergo has inbuilt wallet API which is enough for most use-cases. API has Swagger interface (on 127.0.0.1:9053 by default in the mainnet, 127.0.0.1:9052 in the testnet) with descriptions and examples for API methods.
• How to set up a node: https://ergoplatform.org/en/blog/2019_12_02_how_to_setup/, https://github.com/ergoplatform/ergo/wiki/Set-up-a-full-node

Please run the node with -Xmx3G flag, e.g. java -jar -Xmx3G ergo-4.0.4.jar --mainnet -c mainnet.conf

Node Wallet

Node wallet has UI available @ 127.0.0.1:9053/panel by default on the mainnet (127.0.0.1:9052/panel on the testnet). Main methods:

• /wallet/init and /wallet/restore to create a wallet (and a secret mnemonic) and restore wallet from mnemonic
• /wallet/unlock to unlock the wallet (it is unlocked after init but locked after restart)
• /wallet/lock to lock the wallet
• /wallet/payment/send to send a simple payment
• /wallet/status to get wallet status
• /wallet/deriveNextKey to derive a new key according to EIP-3 (BIP 44 implementation for Ergo)
• /wallet/balances to get wallet balance (for all the addresses)
• /wallet/transactions to get wallet transactions (for all the addresses)

Doing an external wallet

If you are going to do wallet logic externally, you can do it with a library and also the block explorer. Please note, you need to consider mempool transactions to avoid double-spending generation.

Available libraries are:

• ergo-wallet made in Java (sources are in Ergo node repository)
• sigma-rust in Rust
• ergo-ts in TypeScript
• ergo-golang in Go (still raw)

Examples below are made with ergo-wallet and Java language.

Offline Signing

Transaction assembly and offline signing demo using ergo-wallet and Java is provided in https://gist.github.com/kushti/c040f244865a451b94df01032c7a3456

Composing transaction outside the node

To get unspent UTXOs for some address, please use transactions/boxes/byAddress/unspent Explorer API method: https://api.ergoplatform.com/transactions/boxes/byAddress/unspent/9gAE5e454UT5s3NB1625u1LynQYPS2XzzBEK4xumvSZdqnXT35M .

You need to exclude UTXOs spent in the mempool! Use /transactions/unconfirmed/byAddress Explorer API method for that: https://api.ergoplatform.com/transactions/unconfirmed/byAddress/9gAE5e454UT5s3NB1625u1LynQYPS2XzzBEK4xumvSZdqnXT35M

Address generation

Secret seed and derived addresses generation demo using ergo-wallet and Java is provided in https://gist.github.com/kushti/70dcfa841dfb504721f09c911b0fc53d

Own Testnet and Explorer Infrastructure

You can use ergo-bootstrap to install Explorer backend easily (and so not rely on public ones).

To start your own testnet, use the following node:

ergo {
  networkType = "testnet"

  node {
    mining = true
    offlineGeneration = true
    useExternalMiner = false
  }
}

scorex {

 network {
    bindAddress = "0.0.0.0:9020"
    nodeName = "ergo-testnet-4.0.4"
    knownPeers = []
  }

 restApi {
    # Hex-encoded Blake2b256 hash of an API key. Should be 64-chars long Base16 string.
    # Below is hash corresponding to API_KEY = "hello" (with no quotes)
    apiKeyHash = "324dcf027dd4a30a932c441f365a25e86b173defa4b8e58948253471b81b72cf"
  }
}

and then the node will CPU-mine its own chain.

Any suggestions for improvements are welcomed! Please send them to [email protected] or #development channel in Discord https://discord.gg/kj7s7nb