How to Detect Cardano Deposits Without Running a Full Node (opens in new tab)

A custodial Cardano product has two real time data problems. The first is showing customers their balances, native asset holdings, and staking rewards, which is covered in the companion guide on polling Cardano stake and reward balances at scale. The second is detecting incoming deposits and outgoing withdrawals against thousands of customer addresses without operating `cardano-node` and `cardano-db-sync`. This article walks through the deposit detection architecture used by production custod...