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About Archive Nodes

Mina nodes are succinct by default, so they don't need to maintain historical information about the network, block, or transactions. An archive node is a Mina node that stores the historical chain data to a persistent data source, PostgreSQL, so it can later be retrieved. For some use cases, it is useful to maintain this historical data on an archive node.

tip

A zkApp can retrieve events and actions from one or more Mina archive nodes. If your smart contract needs to fetch events and actions from an archive node, see How to Fetch Events and Actions.

An archive node is a regular mina daemon that is connected to a running mina-archive process.

The mina daemon regularly sends blockchain data to the mina-archive process that then stores it in a PostgreSQL database.

Running an archive node requires some knowledge of managing a PostgreSQL database instance. You must set up a database, run the archive node, connect it to a daemon, and run queries on the data.

Archive Node

This section describes how to set up and run an Archive node within the Mina protocol.