Downloading Cardano Blockchain

Quick way to start your Cardano node

Synchronizing the Cardano blockchain from scratch will take a long time, depending on your CPU and network connection it could take up to several days.

We will use the cSnapshots.io service to download the latest snapshot for a faster boot.

sudo apt update && sudo apt install liblz4-tool jq curl -y

downloading and extracting the DB archive (to save space, it will stream the archive and extract it on the fly - without storing the downloaded archive itself)

first - let's delete old files:

rm -rf /home/cardano/cnode/db 

Downloading the latest blockchain archive

Mainnet

curl -o - https://downloads.csnapshots.io/snapshots/mainnet/$(curl -s https://downloads.csnapshots.io/snapshots/mainnet/mainnet-db-snapshot.json| jq -r .[].file_name ) | lz4 -c -d - | tar -x -C /home/cardano/cnode/

TestNet

curl -o - https://downloads.csnapshots.io/snapshots/testnet/$(curl -s https://downloads.csnapshots.io/snapshots/testnet/testnet-db-snapshot.json| jq -r .[].file_name ) | lz4 -c -d - | tar -x -C /home/cardano/cnode/

Wait till it downloads, it could take a while, based on your internet speed. (Mainnet archive is >60GB; TestNet is <1GB)