Introduction

Firewood is an embedded key-value store optimized for storing recent Merkleized blockchain state with minimal overhead. It is built for the Avalanche C-Chain and EVM-compatible blockchains that keep state in Merkle tries.

Unlike most state-management approaches, Firewood uses the trie structure directly as its on-disk index rather than emulating a trie on top of a generic key-value store such as LevelDB or RocksDB. It is compaction-less: trie nodes are written directly to a single database file, addressed by their offset within that file.

This site is the front door to Firewood’s documentation:

• Getting Started walks through setting up a development environment.
• Concepts & Architecture explains the trie storage model, revisions, and hashing.
• Design Documents records the designs behind Firewood’s on-disk format and subsystems, and describes how new designs are proposed and reviewed.
• Integration covers the Go FFI and how AvalancheGo consumes Firewood.
• Operations & Benchmarking covers the fwdctl CLI and performance dashboards.
• Reference links to the generated Rust and Go API documentation.

Warning

Firewood is beta-level software. Its API is still evolving and stability is not yet guaranteed.