Max number of addresses per node

Question

Hi Multichain Team,

What is the max number of addresses which I can create per node? Can I create lets say 1 million addresses on one node?

Actually I was thinking of a B2C(business to consumer) usecase and thinking if it can be implemented using multichain.

Answer 1

There is no hard limit but you will experience performance problems, since MultiChain has not yet been designed to scale to this many addresses in a single wallet. For example, the process of coin selection can be very slow with more than a few thousand addresses. We know what's necessary to make this possible (mainly, better indexing), but we just haven't done it yet.

Comments

Does this limitation also pertain to watch-only addresses when storing private keys externally and using the importaddress API?

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The main scalability problem occurs during coin selection. So if you're trying to generate transactions (even for external signing) on a wallet with millions of addresses (even if watch-only), I'm afraid you'll still have the same problem.

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Is one possible solution to limit the number of address in a single node's wallet via my application's API?

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Yes, of course, because in any event the API is the only thing that can cause addresses to be added.