Mirror Nodes

Mirror Nodes are your gateway to data on the HashGraph.

Mirror nodes are read-only copies of the state of the network meant to be used for most of your data queries.

While it is possible to run your own mirror node, you will quickly find the cost of deploying and maintaining this infrastructure is quite high and generally ill-advised.

This is where the public mirror node and other mirror node providers come in.

It is highly recommended you use a paid mirror node provider when you push your app live.

Also note that there is a 5-15 second delay on most data posted to a mirror node - it is recommended you use paid mainnet queries for any mission-critical data.

The Public Mirror Node

The public mirror node is a free-to-use mirror node service provided by Hedera meant for development. It is globally rate limited at 100 requests per second, but provides a bare minimum environment for playing around.

Again just to stress - DO NOT EVER USE THE PUBLIC MIRROR NODE IN PRODUCTION.

You can find information about the public mirror node here.

One cool thing the public mirror node provides is a Swagger based sandbox you can explore the different endpoints with.

Mirror Node Providers

Hgraph.io

Hraph.io is a graphQL based mirror node service that allows for super optimized and complex queries, it also has a rest API available.

Arkhia This is the most widely used mirror node in the ecosystem, offering great stability and customer support.

Validation Cloud A newcomer to Hedera, Validation Cloud offers a very generous free tier which may suit small dapps well.