The server indexes UTXOs by address, in a Patricia tree structure described by Alan Reiner (see the 'ultimate blockchain compression' thread in the Bitcointalk forum)
The server requires VERGEd, leveldb, and plyvel
The server code is open source. Anyone can run a server, removing single points of failure concerns.
To install and run a server, see INSTALL. For greater detail on the installation process, see HOWTO.md.
To start and stop the server, use the 'electrum-server' script
Electrum-server is made available under the terms of the MIT License.
See the included LICENSE
for more details.