Requirements

Hardware, network, storage, and port requirements for running a production-grade archival fullnode on the Movement blockchain.

To ensure that your archival fullnode operates smoothly, it should meet the requirements specified in this document.

Hardware requirements

Minimum hardware requirements

Failing to meet the minimum hardware requirements means that your archival node will experience degradation under load and general instability in production environments. Archival nodes have higher requirements than standard PFNs due to the complete blockchain history they maintain.

For running a production-grade archival node, we recommend:

Resource	Minimum	Recommended
Storage	1TB NVMe SSD	2TB+ NVMe SSD
Memory	16GB RAM	32GB RAM
CPU	8 cores	16 cores
Network	100 Mbps	1 Gbps

Storage growth

Archival nodes store the complete blockchain history and will continue to grow over time. As of January 2026:

Mainnet: ~700GB
Testnet: ~260GB

Plan for storage expansion as the blockchain grows.

Network requirements and ports

When running an archival node, you need to open network ports to allow other nodes (peers) to connect. The public network is used for PFNs to connect to other PFNs and VFNs.

Port settings

The recommendations below assume default port settings. If you have changed the default port settings in your configuration file, adjust accordingly.

Exposing ports

Unless explicitly required, we recommend that you do not expose any other ports while operating an archival node. Exposing additional ports can increase the attack surface of your node.

Running an archival node:

Assuming default ports are used, configure the following:

Open the following TCP ports:
- 6182 – Public network: Open this port publicly to enable other PFNs to connect to your node.
Close the following TCP ports:
- 9101 – Inspection service: Close this port to prevent unauthorized metric inspection.
- 9102 – Admin service: Close this port to prevent unauthorized admin service interaction.
- 80/8080 - REST API: Close this port to prevent unauthorized REST API access.

Exposing services

The inspection service port (9101), admin service port (9102) and the REST API port (80 or 8080) are useful for your internal network (e.g., application development and debugging). However, the inspection service port and the admin service port should never be exposed publicly. If you expose the REST API endpoint publicly, deploy additional authentication or rate-limiting to prevent abuse.

Storage requirements

Archival nodes store the entire history of the blockchain, so the database size will continue to grow unbounded. Unlike standard PFNs that prune old data, archival nodes maintain complete ledger history from genesis.

Current storage estimates:

Mainnet: ~700GB (and growing)
Testnet: ~260GB (and growing)

We recommend using NVMe SSDs for optimal performance due to the high I/O requirements of archival nodes.

Software requirements

You will need one of the following:

Docker (recommended for most users)
Rust toolchain (for building from source)

Additionally, to bootstrap your archival node from Movement Labs' public backups, you will need:

restic backup tool (installation instructions)

Bootstrapping from backups

Movement Labs provides public backups of archival node data that are updated hourly. This is the fastest way to bootstrap an archival node rather than syncing from genesis.

Download and use the restore script from the Movement Networks repository:

# Download the restore script
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/movementlabsxyz/movement-networks/main/l1_restore.sh
chmod +x l1_restore.sh

# Restore mainnet data
./l1_restore.sh mainnet ./data

# Or restore testnet data
./l1_restore.sh testnet ./data

The script handles all the restic configuration for anonymous access to the public S3 backup buckets.

Backup schedule

Frequency: Hourly snapshots
Retention: 14 days of snapshots
Format: restic backup repositories