Welcome to our Frequently asked questions section! We welcome you to explore and learn more about what makes Koios valuable to our community.

What does the name 'Koios' mean?

The name Koios – derived from ancient Greek ‘Κοιος’ – meaning “question”, “inquiry” or “inquisitiveness.” is the Titan of Resolve & Intelligence and also a god of heavenly oracles.

What is Koios?

Koios is a DAO created by long-term contributors within cardano ecosystem. The primary product from Koios is a distributed query layer, that does not rely on a centralised organisation, can work with community to scale across geography/providers/entities and work towards converging these into an open-source, self-sustainable, distributed system. Read more about the Koios architecture here.

How can I get support or assistance with Koios?

If you have any questions, issues, or suggestions related to Koios, you can reach out to the Koios community through the GitHub repository or via Discussions Channel

How can I stay updated with Koios developments?

The best way to stay updated with the latest news and developments regarding Koios is via our Announcements Channel if you're deeply involved OR via Blueskye App / X (https://x.com/CardanoKoios) if you're casual reader. These platforms will provide information on updates, new features, and announcements related to Koios API and its ecosystem.

How is Koios API different from other API providers?

• Koios is Elastic in nature (folks are free to add their instances to the public query layer, improving strength of the overall infrastructure OR run instance[s]/clusters locally). Instance providers will soon be incentivised to do join the community cluster.
• We have started our journey relying on open source framework from day 1. The libraries in different languages have been independently contributed by the awesome community.
• The query layer is distributed - Koios is not locked down to a single entity, infrastructure provider, geography, etc. Each instance is fully capable to act as a master to it's downstream peers.
• Participation is flexible, developers/consumers are free to elect - whether to simply use API without any software, run Koios locally on their end, OR bring their instance to the query layer with automated failover support - should their instance be down.
• As compared to other RPC providers, who often return 1 object at a time - we offer bulk objects support (eg: you can query 25 transactions in a single call, only restricted by resource and time consumption), this often becomes a major differentiator when electing API between providers for those who are primarily looking at consumption limits between providers.
• We host a public cluster (which includes set of monitoring layer to perform health-checks , provide familiar UX of working with remote servers based on querying a DNS-based URL, coordination, etc), at the same time, there are also others who run koios clusters in public/semi-public or private settings (eg: Dandelion offers public instance of Koios, Eternl/NMKR/VESPR/TosiDrop use their own instances with their own nodes, some have their private clusters that failover to public ones, etc)

Why centralised DNS and who pays for Koios DNS/domain registrations?

While we'd love to use a decentralised DNS option and have already tried to - currently, the DNS landscape is not yet mature-enough for us to really use DNS on blockchain, as it relies on either having custom nameservers or using additional proxy/applications. Thus, an application leveraging DNS entries on-chain will not have native integration to an average user's machine, unless they set up their client machines itself to connect to these custom name servers (also, there will still be a concern around NS being somewhat centralised even if providing data from chain). Thus, until there is such a solution , we're forced to rely on UX that does not require end user to cross hoops. As regards who pays for the domain registrations, these are costs managed by instance providers (for first two years, these are being managed by core members who initiated the DAO creation) - with team access.

What problems does Koios solve?

Koios addresses the below challenges:

• As the size of blockchain grows rapidly, so does expense of resources as well as maintenance costs (impacting financially as well as time) to maintain a scalable professional solutions. Koios provides the flexibility for anyone to run a fully self-dependent node with failover support out of the box OR start querying without having any setup locally - without centralising to any single organisation. -Folks who do put in tremendous amount of efforts to go through discovery phrase - are often ending up with local solutions, that may not be consistent across the board. Since all the queries used by Koios layer is open-source on GitHub, anyone can contribute or leverage the query knowledge base, and help each other out while doing so. An additional endpoint added will only be load balanced between the servers that pass the health-check for the endpoint.
• It is almost impossible to fetch some live data (for example, Live Stake against a pool) due to the cost of computation and amount of data on chain. For such queries, many folks are already using different cache methods, or capturing ledger information from node. Wouldn't it be nice to have these crunched data that take quite a few minutes to run be shared and available to be able to pick a relatively recent execution across the nodes? This will be available out of the box as part of Koios API.
• There is also a worry when going through updates about feasibility/breaking changes/etc. that can become a bottleneck for providers. Since Koios participants automatically receive failover support, they reduce impact of any subset of clusters going through update process.
• The lightweight query layers currently present are unfortunately create a single entity of failure. With Koios, our aim is to give enough flexibility to all the participants to select their backend, or pick from any of the available ones instead.
• Bad human errors causing an outage? The bandwidth for Koios becomes better with more participation, but just in case there is not enough participation - we will ensure that at least 4 trusted Koios mainnet instances across the globe will be around - in addition to free instances for Preprod & Preview networks, allowing for enough time for adoption to build up gradually.
• Flexibility to participate at different levels. A consumer of these services can participate with a complete independent instance (optionally extend existing ones), by running only certain parts (e.g. submit-api only), or simply consuming the API without running anything locally.

What are the benefits of using Koios API?

By utilizing Koios API, users can enjoy several benefits, including:

• Access to a decentralized and elastic RESTful query layer for exploring data on the Cardano blockchain.
• Reduced maintenance costs and resources associated with running a scalable solution.
• Failover support and health-checks to ensure synchronized and up-to-date data.
• Consistency and collaboration through a shared query knowledge base.
• Availability of pre-computed data for time-consuming queries.
• Flexibility to participate at different levels, from running independent instances to consuming the API without local setup.

Is there a price attached to using services?

For most of the userbase, the services are completely free. There are DDoS protection and strict timeout rules that may prevent certain use-cases from using this remotely. For such heavy consumption, there are premium options with dedicated infrastructure and alternate considerations. Visit Pricing & Tiers page for further details

Can I contribute to Koios?

Absolutely! Koios operates on opensource framework and welcomes contributions from the community. You can contribute at different layers:

• Stand up a gRest instance and add your backend instance to the cluster
• Contribute to the open-source codebase
• Leveraging the query knowledge base, helping improve the query layer.
• Raise issues, or submit pull requests to collaborate with the Koios community or have interesting conversations in discussions channel.

Where can I find the code run behind-the-scenes for queries?

All the Postgres codebase against dbsync instance is available on Koios Artifacts GitHub repository in a format aligned with the endpoints

How does Koios ensure data reliability?

Koios implements health-checks for many endpoints to ensure that connections are directed to backend instances with up-to-date and synchronized versions of the data. By automatically load balancing between the servers that pass the health-check, Koios minimizes the chances of connecting to a backend with stale information. Since the data being read is served by multiple instances - when working against paginated calls, we always recommend users to elect a field to order by - so that they're not hit by inconsistent sorting of the database behind-the-scenes (adding such sorting by default would unnecessarily add a performance overload that might not be desirable for certain endpoints)

Can Koios handle breaking changes and updates?

Koios participants benefit from failover support, which reduces the impact of clusters going through updates or experiencing breaking changes. By distributing the load and maintaining multiple instances, Koios minimizes disruptions and ensures a smoother transition during update processes.