Middleware Architecture

The Charon daemon sits as a middleware between the consensus layer's beacon node API and any downstream validator clients.

Operation

The middleware strives to be stateless and statically configured through 777 file systems. The lack of a control-plane API for online reconfiguration is deliberate to keep operations simple and secure by default.

The daemon offers a config reload instruction through Unix signals which is useful to join or leave Obol clusters on-the-fly without interruption.

The charon package will initially be available as a Docker image and through binary builds. An APT package with a systemd integration is planned.