🏗️Integration Guide

This guide is aimed at developers willing to integrate their software with Witnet and the Wit coin in such a way that they can manage addresses, balances, and create and verify transactions.

Running Witnet-Rust

The Witnet Foundation-supported reference implementation of the Witnet protocol is Witnet-Rust.

Witnet-Rust can be easily run:

• as a Docker container

• as a docker-compose service

• as a systemd service

• compiling from source code

Witnet-Rust Components

Witnet-Rust contains two different components that provide different degrees of wallet functionality:

• node, which implements a Witnet full node with an internal single-account, single-address wallet and a JSON-RPC API over TCP.

• wallet, which implements a BIP-32 compliant, multi-account, multi-address Hierarchical Deterministic wallet, and a JSON-RPC API over WebSockets.

Witnet-Rust node component

The Witnet-Rust node component is standalone — you can run it on its own and it will provide full-node functionality: syncing up the Witnet block chain, validate transactions and blocks in real time, and (optionally) propose blocks.

Integration architecture:
[YOUR APP] → [WITNET-RUST NODE] → [WITNET NETWORK]

Once a node instance is fully synced, its JSON-RPC over TCP API offers a minimal single-account, single-address wallet.

Running a Witnet-Rust node with the JSON-RPC API exposed on local port 21338 can easily be achieved with this Docker one-liner:

docker run -d \
    --name witnet_node \
    --volume ~/.witnet:/.witnet \
    --publish 21337:21337 \
    --publish 21338:21338 \
    --restart always \
    witnet/witnet-rust

Here is a quick guide on how to interact with a node using the JSON-RPC interface and any TCP client:

Interacting with a Witnet Node via a Remote Procedure Call (RPC)Medium

The full list of supported JSON-RPC methods is available in the Node API Reference:

Node API Reference

There is also a command line client (CLI) that exposes all the node functionality and uses the JSON-RPC API under the hood:

⌨️CLI Reference

Witnet-Rust wallet component

The Witnet-Rust wallet component is NOT standalone. It requires a connection to an instance of the node component that will act as its "backend":

Integration architecture:
[YOUR APP] → [WITNET-RUST WALLET] → [WITNET-RUST NODE] → [WITNET NETWORK]

Witnet Foundation operates a cluster of publicly available node instances that act as the backend for the wallet component contained within the Sheikah Witnet wallet desktop app, which follows exactly the same architecture:

Sheikah Wallet app architecture:
[SHEIKAH UI*] → [WITNET-RUST WALLET*] → [WITNET-RUST NODE] → [WITNET NETWORK]

* The Sheikah UI and the Witnet-Rust wallet are run in the user's computer.

For users looking for the maximum degree of privacy, it is recommended that they run their own instance of the node component, because otherwise they may be disclosing their addresses and balances to 3rd parties, as the queries between the wallet and node components need to be sent over the Internet.

The JSON-RPC API of the wallet component is different than the one from the node not because it has much more advanced wallet functionality, and uses a WebSockets transport instead of plain TCP (this is to enable web wallets and similar apps).

A full reference of the Wallet API can be found here:

Wallet API Reference