Argus

Warning

Experimental — exploration / toy examples only. This is a research spike to explore the Ethereum Access Layer privacy stack (Helios + Tor + Kohaku provider), not a product. Expect rough edges, breaking changes, and incomplete pieces. Do not use in production or rely on it for anything serious. No guarantees of correctness, security, or maintenance.

Verifiable, private RSS for Ethereum. Subscribe to a contract's events in any RSS reader and get a feed where every item is verifiable — proven against the consensus sync committee, not trusted from an RPC — and fetched privately, with the watcher's queries routed over Tor.

Demo target: Tornado Cash deposit/withdrawal events.

  upstream RPC (untrusted)
        │  ← routed through Tor (tor-js / Arti-in-WASM)   ← hides who's asking
  Helios light client (@kohaku-eth/provider)
        │  verifies eth_getLogs against the block receiptsRoot
  Watcher  ── filters: contract addresses + event topics
        │
  Feed  ── signed Atom/JSON, each item carries a re-checkable proof
        └──► `argus verify`  ── "don't trust my feed, check it against mainnet yourself"

Most on-chain monitoring trusts an RPC provider to tell the truth and leaks to that provider exactly which contracts you watch. Argus removes both assumptions.

Why this is different

Plenty of tools turn on-chain activity into RSS. What they can't do is let you distrust them: you take their word that the event happened.

Argus ships the proof inside the feed. Every item carries a light-client inclusion proof anchored to the sync-committee-signed block header (the Helios path, not an RPC-returned root), so any subscriber can run argus verify <item> and check it against mainnet — the feed operator is untrusted. And the feed is fetched over Tor, so subscribing leaks nothing about what you watch.

The novel part isn't RSS — it's a verifiable, private feed on the most boring, universal subscription surface there is. Closest neighbors: Helios (trustless event verification, but as an RPC) and Herodotus (log proofs, but webhook-to-contract). Argus is proof-carrying events for a human in any RSS reader.

Argus doesn't claim to have invented verifiable Ethereum access or inclusion proofs — those primitives exist. The new part is welding them onto a standard syndication feed and shipping the proof inside each item.

What it is / is NOT

• IS: read-only indexing of public, immutable on-chain event logs, republished as a signed and independently-verifiable feed.
• IS NOT: it does not interact with any protocol, does not deposit or withdraw, and does not deanonymize anyone. It adds observability for the watcher and privacy for the watcher — never the reverse. The Tornado Cash contracts it reads were OFAC-delisted in March 2025; reading public event logs is neutral, lawful activity.

The stack it reuses (Ethereum Access Layer)

Argus is deliberately a thin integration over Ethereum's emerging privacy stack — it's a reference consumer, not a reimplementation.

Component	Package	Role
Light client provider	@kohaku-eth/provider	EIP-1193 abstraction; verifies logs
Light client	@a16z/helios	verifies eth_getLogs vs receiptsRoot
Network privacy	tor-js	Arti (Tor) in WASM; fetch() over Tor
Stateless client (alt)	@corpus-core/colibri-stateless	candidate portable-proof source
Event decoding	viem	ABI decode

Status

Experimental / exploratory. Toy examples, not production software. M1 works today: Helios (via the Kohaku provider) returns verified Tornado Deposit/Withdrawal events, optionally with all RPC egress over Tor.

Milestone	State
M1 — verified events via Helios + Kohaku provider, Tor egress	✅ working
M2 — portable, re-checkable proof per event	next
M3 — argus verify standalone verifier	planned
M4 — signed Atom/RSS + JSON feed	planned
M5 — ChainFetch-aligned pluggable transport	planned
M6 — docs / CI / hosted feed	planned

See SCOPE.md for the full design.

Quickstart

pnpm install

# dev mode (direct RPC, no Tor) — fastest
ARGUS_TOR=0 ARGUS_LOOKBACK=300 pnpm argus

# with Tor egress (Arti bootstrap; raise the fd limit for the wasm-file store)
ulimit -n 8192
ARGUS_LOOKBACK=200 pnpm argus

Environment:

Var	Default	Meaning
ARGUS_TOR	1	0 disables Tor (dev mode)
ARGUS_LOOKBACK	2000	blocks to scan back from head (≤ ~8191, Helios verified-logs window)
ARGUS_EXECUTION_RPC	publicnode	upstream execution RPC
ARGUS_CONSENSUS_RPC	publicnode beacon	beacon light-client data
ARGUS_CHECKPOINT	—	trusted weak-subjectivity checkpoint (faster sync)

License

MIT