Ingestor

The Ingestor is a Rust service running in Intel TDX that continuously monitors the blockchain for events emitted by the NoxCompute contract and publishes them to a NATS JetStream queue for processing by the Runner.

Role in the Protocol

The Ingestor bridges on-chain and off-chain worlds: it detects computation requests emitted as Solidity events and forwards them as structured messages to the message queue. It is the starting point of every off-chain computation.

How It Works

1. Poll blocks: the Ingestor reads new blocks from the blockchain RPC in batches, with a configurable polling interval.

2. Parse events: contract logs are parsed using Alloy's sol! macro for compile-time type safety. Each event is mapped to a strongly-typed Rust struct.

3. Group by transaction: events from the same transaction are grouped into a single TransactionMessage and ordered by log_index, preserving on-chain execution order.

4. Publish to NATS: the message is published to NATS JetStream with a checksum-based message ID for deduplication (prevents duplicate processing on restarts).

5. Persist state: the last processed block number is saved to disk, allowing the Ingestor to resume from where it left off after a restart.

Monitored Events

The Ingestor listens for all events emitted by the NoxCompute contract. Each event corresponds to a computation primitive (arithmetic, comparisons, token operations, etc.). See Solidity Library for the full list.

Key Design Choices

• Optimistic processing: blocks are processed as soon as they appear, without waiting for confirmations. This enables low-latency event detection. If a processed event belongs to a block that is later reorganized (fork), the corresponding handle is removed from the canonical chain.
• Deduplication: NATS JetStream message IDs based on content checksums prevent duplicate processing when the Ingestor restarts and re-reads recent blocks.
• Stateless scaling: multiple Ingestor instances can run in parallel for redundancy. NATS JetStream deduplication ensures each event is processed only once.

Learn More

• Runner - Processes the computation requests
• Handle Gateway - Stores encrypted handle data
• Nox Smart Contracts - Emits the monitored events
• Global Architecture Overview