Fulcrum: A speedy and flexible SPV server for Bitcoin Cash, BTC, and Litecoin

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maxi07Full Member
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#1Sep 12, 2019, 03:17 PM
Hey everyone, The Fulcrum SPV server just launched a new retro-style website that’s straight out of the 90s https://fulcrumserver.org/ For anyone using Fulcrum: Is there anything you think should be added to the site? Also, if you have any feature requests or want another cryptocurrency to be supported, reach out to the developer. He's definitely willing to prioritize what gets added if there's some motivation (like donations).
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colddiamondHero Member
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#2Sep 12, 2019, 06:37 PM
The link to the only releases you should download are: https://github.com/cculianu/Fulcrum/releases Don't know if that site is legit or not at the moment. The developer has not mentioned it on his github page: https://github.com/cculianu/Fulcrum?tab=readme-ov-file A link discussing it here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5441463.0 I did run it for a while and it does work well. But with all the other nodes I have, running a dedicated machine for just that just seemed like a waste. Will probably spin another one up sooner or later to see if anything has changed. -Dave
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maxi07Full Member
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#3Sep 12, 2019, 07:16 PM
That is true. Note, that this website does not host binaries! Edit: It is now referenced on GitHub https://github.com/cculianu/Fulcrum/blob/master/README.md
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im_lynxHero Member
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#4Sep 12, 2019, 09:53 PM
I've been using Fulcrum as my personal Electrum server for quite some time and am very happy with its speed compared to electrs. Just recently I upgraded from version 1.12 to the new version 2 which required a complete new sync. While Fulcrum is faster than electrs to deliver queries of a SPV wallet, it does sync considerably slower than electrs. But as the author of Fulcrum claims that version 2 has better database atomicity and much better resilience to potential database corruption issues, it was a no-brainer for me to upgrade. I'm running a Bitcoin Core full node and the Fulcrum Electrum server in containers managed by Umbrel in a Virtualbox VM running on a PC host in Linux Mint. It's an old  Dell Latitude E7470 laptop and I gave this VM about 24GiB RAM as I'm running and testing out other containers therein, too. The Bitcoin Core node was already synced and Fulcrum took around 8 days and a few additional hours to sync fully, see fragments of the Fulcrum log below. I'll make a backup of the synced Fulcrum to avoid these 8 days of syncing if something should break in the future. Timestamps are in UTC; syncing Fulcrum was interrupted one time around the middle of total blocks to tweak a few settings in the hopes to speed up the process a little bit which is why it logged "... Processed 411320 new blocks ...":
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#5Sep 13, 2019, 02:58 AM
Thanks for this update. I'm planning on setting up my own Fulcrum server soon, so I look forward to hearing how it goes with the new version.
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im_lynxHero Member
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#6Sep 13, 2019, 06:11 AM
My one or two Electrum wallets that I use regularly work just fine with Fulcrum. I didn't notice any difference to the prior version of Fulcrum. They open almost instantly. (Those two Electrum wallets aren't particularly large, meaning they don't have a large transaction history or have lots of addresses being used.) At the moment I'm not going to test and evaluate how resilient Fulcrum v2 is regarding database corruption. I can't remember to have had an issue with corruption with Fulcrum 1.x before. My old Fulcrum always opened its databases happily without complaining, but I paid attention to not kill any Fulcrum process ungracefully. I had maybe only very few unexpected container restarts with the old version and it didn't feel comfortable to hope that Fulcrum's databases won't become corrupted. I just leave it running 24/7 because the Bitcoin Core node runs 24/7, too. Later edit: Fulcrum v2 can also serve large address histories without choking. E.g. it synced a test watch-only Electrum wallet of the P2PKH legacy address representation of the Genesis block (1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa). My test wallet synced to 54,274 transactions for this legacy address as of 2025-11-22 ~17:00 UTC. This took some time but finished without errors (needs a bit of tweaking both for Fulcrum Server and Electrum 4.6.2 to accept large address history responses).
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