Embedded Lantern

Curio Core ships with Lantern embedded as a Go library. Lantern is a pure-Go Filecoin light client that does end-to-end cryptographic verification of the chain:

• BLS header signatures — validates miner block signatures via the actor power table.
• F3 finality certs — finalised tipsets are gated by GPBFT (F3) certificates pulled from peers, not trusted from an upstream RPC.
• DRAND beacons — every block's random beacon is verified against DRAND's BLS public key.
• Content-addressed state — when curio-core asks for StateMinerInfo or similar, the state tree is fetched as IPLD blocks from peers and the response is reconstructed locally — no trust in any single peer.

Why not just Lotus?

Upstream Curio requires a Lotus full node (~76 GB chain DB, 24-hour initial sync). For a solo operator running on a single VM, that's an order-of-magnitude infrastructure jump just to bootstrap.

Lantern reduces that to ~200 MB of local state and a few seconds of bootstrap.

How does curio-core use Lantern?

Lantern exposes a Lotus-compatible JSON-RPC surface in-process. Curio-core's task pipelines talk to the same FullNode API they would talk to against a real Lotus node — they just get answers from Lantern instead.

The bits that matter for an SP:

API surface	Use
Filecoin.ChainHead / eth_blockNumber	Live chain head for proof scheduling + dashboard
Filecoin.StateMinerInfo	Miner actor metadata for the registered SP
Filecoin.StateGetRandomnessDigestFromBeacon	The challenge seed input for PDP proofs
Filecoin.MpoolPush / Filecoin.EthSendRawTransaction	Broadcast our proof + settlement txes
eth_call, eth_estimateGas, eth_getTransactionReceipt	FEVM contract reads + tx tracking
eth_getBalance, ERC-20 balanceOf	Wallet balance reads for the dashboard

FEVM bridge

For Ethereum-style operations that Lantern's local state can't answer (typically gas estimation for contract calls), Lantern proxies to an upstream Filecoin RPC. By default that's https://api.calibration.node.glif.io/rpc/v1 on calibration, or https://api.node.glif.io/rpc/v1 on mainnet.

You can override via:

curio-core run --vm-bridge-rpc https://your-own-rpc.example.com/

TIP

Lantern verifies every block locally; the upstream RPC is only used for the small set of operations Lantern cannot derive (mostly eth_estimateGas). It is not a trust root — a malicious upstream RPC can refuse service but cannot lie about chain state.

Where is the data?

<data-dir>/<network>/headerstore/      # Lantern's header DB
<data-dir>/<network>/blockstore/       # IPLD blocks for state queries
<data-dir>/<network>/peerstore/        # libp2p peer book

These are safe to delete if you want a fresh Lantern bootstrap (the next run will re-discover peers and re-sync headers). Don't delete them while curio-core is running.

Lantern's own docs

For Lantern internals — bootstrap quorum, F3 cert exchange, beacon resilience — see the Lantern documentation at https://github.com/Reiers/lantern (separate repo, same operator).