Introduction

Constellations is a high-performance and real-time indexer developed by Fabien Penso for Stargaze, a L1 blockchain on Cosmos focusing on NFTs. Constellations is currently used by Stargaze for its main website to display data in the fastest way possible, and we decided to make its API available to anyone.

Constellations is:

  1. A public facing website available at www.constellations.zone to view its data. This is mostly used to "validate" internal information, and you are invited to use the Stargaze main website instead, unless you're looking for information not available there.

  2. A set of API to fetch data Constellations has indexed. This API is available over GraphQL and self-generated GraphQL documentation is enabled.

You should already know about GraphQL to use Constellations. You can read more about GraphQL here.

How is it built?

Constellations is built entirely in Rust with tendermint-rs, backed with Posgresql and hosted on bare metal servers for optimum performance. It fetches blocks live from the blockchain over websockets, and parse them instantly. It currently is running on 3 servers:

  1. Dedibox: Xeon E3 1245v5, 32GB
  2. Hetzner: AMD Ryzen 3600, 64GB
  3. Interserver: AMD RYZEN 5600X, 64GB

It ran fine on a single server, but we wanted to have redundancy to avoid downtimes. These days it manages way over 10 million requests per day.

Safety

While I try to minimize bugs and issues, Constellations sometimes (but rarily) stops indexing, or has an indexing issue which means it does not reflect the blockchain data. It is highly recommended to use Stargaze RPC servers to verify information if you are moving tokens. For example, if you want to send STARS to a given Stargaze name, you should use the RPC server to get the STARS address associated with that given name, and not Constellations which could lead to sending STARS to an old associated address if the indexer stopped.

Timestamps

All timestamps you get are UTC and don't include timezone.

User Agent

Add a way to contact you in the User-Agent header in case I need to get in touch with you if you are making too many requests.

Throttling

There is no throttling in place for now but will be soon. Please don't hammer the server with too many calls.

Contributing to this documentation

This documentation is available on GitHub and issues and feature requests can be posted on the GitHub issue tracker. Please consider opening a pull request.

I can't find how to fetch specific data

Create an issue with as many details as possible, contract type, information you want and why you want to fetch it.

License

The Constellations documentation are released under the Mozilla Public License v2.0.