Introduction
In this post, I want to summarize what I have learned so far about the Pallas and Mithril projects in the Cardano ecosystem.
Before deep diving into the Mithril codebase and starting to contribute, I felt it was important to organize my understanding and thoughts clearly.
My goal is to become a blockchain engineer working on Cardano infrastructure, and this summary helps me confirm that I have the right mental model before moving forward.
Why the Pallas Project Exists
Cardano’s mainnet and core node software are implemented in Haskell. While Haskell is powerful, it creates a high barrier for developers who want to interact directly with Cardano using other languages, especially Rust.
If a developer wants to understand Cardano data formats, network protocols, or transaction structures at a low level, they usually need to read Haskell code and understand how cardano-node works internally.
This is where Pallas comes in.
Pallas is a collection of Rust libraries that re-implement Cardano’s data formats and protocols in a Rust-friendly way. It allows developers to interact with the Cardano mainnet without writing or deeply understanding Haskell. Instead, developers can use Rust to decode blocks, inspect transactions, build transactions, and communicate with Cardano nodes.
What Pallas Provides
Pallas is not a single library, but a set of modules, each with a specific responsibility:
- primitives: defines Cardano data types such as transactions, blocks, values, scripts, and metadata
- codec: handles serialization and deserialization (mainly CBOR)
- network: implements Cardano node-to-node communication protocols
- txbuilder: helps construct Cardano transactions
- traverse: provides era-agnostic ways to inspect blocks and transactions
- hardano: interoperates with Cardano node storage formats
- crypto: cryptographic utilities used by Cardano
- math / utxorpc: supporting utilities and interoperability layers
All of these modules focus on one core idea:
How to correctly represent, encode, decode, and interact with Cardano data and protocols in Rust.
Because of Pallas, Rust developers can build useful tools such as wallets, indexers, explorers, analytics services, and other infrastructure components without relying on Haskell code. This significantly lowers the entry barrier for system-level development in the Cardano ecosystem.
Why Mithril Exists
While Pallas helps developers interact with Cardano, another major challenge remains: verification and synchronization.
To fully verify Cardano data from scratch, a client normally needs to download and validate a very large amount of blockchain data. In practice, this means many applications depend on full nodes or trusted servers to provide data, because downloading and validating everything locally is slow and resource-intensive.
This is why Mithril was created.
Mithril provides a way to verify Cardano blockchain state efficiently, without downloading the entire chain. It does this by using stake-weighted cryptographic certificates.
Snapshots and Certificates (Important Distinction)
In Mithril, there are two different concepts:
- A snapshot is a compressed representation of the Cardano chain state at a specific point in time.
- A certificate is a small cryptographic proof showing that this snapshot was approved by stake pool operators representing a large percentage of total ADA stake.
A client downloads both the snapshot and its certificate.
The client then verifies the certificate locally. If the certificate is valid, the client can trust that the snapshot represents a chain state that the Cardano network agreed on at that time.
It is important to note that Mithril does not re-validate individual transactions or UTXOs. That work is already done by Cardano nodes. Mithril verifies agreement on the resulting state, not the full transaction history.
What Problem Mithril Solves
Mithril reduces the need to trust a single server and removes the need to download massive amounts of historical data just to get started. By verifying a small certificate instead of the full chain, clients can:
- bootstrap much faster
- reduce infrastructure and storage costs
- rely on Cardano’s stake-based security model instead of centralized trust
This makes Mithril especially useful for infrastructure tools, indexers, research systems, and future interoperability solutions.
What I Did Not Deep Dive Into (Yet)
Topics such as bridges, sidechains, oracles, and cross-chain interoperability are closely related to Mithril, but they require a much deeper understanding of blockchain systems and security models.
For now, I chose not to dive deeply into these topics. I understand that Mithril helps make these systems safer and more verifiable, but I plan to study them later in more detail.
Next
Deep dive into the Mithril project structure, understand how each module works, why it exists, and how the system operates end to end. My goal is to contribute to the Mithril project and grow as a blockchain engineer.
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