Hacked a bit as a hobby project over the last months to see how mature and ready the libbitcoinkernel was to be used on its own only, without necessarily using the others subsystems.

For a tl;dr the libbitcoinkernel is an attempt as extracting the consensus engine out of bitcoin core, and make it this consensus engine ready to use by other implementations, or even letting people re-writing full-node implementations from scratch on top of it. Cross-fingered and hopefully, if this decoupling of the consensus engine is done well from bitcoin core, transactions and blocks validated by another implementation should be fully compatible, bug for bug existent since the old days of satoshi.

If more folks are interested to experiment with the libbitcoinkernel (this assume strong background in C / C++ and bitcoin engineering), I already extracted the libbitcoinkernel and the test standalone binary wrapping it on their own and made them available in a public repository (as of bitcoind tag release 27.0 and with the necessary bug fixes in the build system to really make it work).

Normally it should compile, but it’s indeed calling for more testing and refinement. Especially if folks wish to use a different build system than autotools and makefiles. If more folks are interested to experiment with it, I might spend a bit more time to make it work on more platforms, though it’s only hobby hacking for me in the true open-source spirit. Already very busy with some real vulnerabilities to get fixed on bitcoin and lightning.