🚧 Project Abundance 🚧

This week has been another of those weeks where I am pretty happy with the progress made. The highlights of the week are the following: (i) we now have a pretty good sense of the end-to-end operation to commit shard segments into the global history of the beacon chain (as described in the discussion of PR267); (ii) and Nazar had an idea to tackle the verification of the availability and correctness of shard segments without requiring an independent data availability mechanism, by leveraging the longest-chain rule and farmers membership allocation (which was an issue that was really bugging me). Let’s jump into the details of these two topics.

There have not been an update from me last week, how come? Well, it didn’t seem like there was anything particularly substantial to share, mostly some refactoring, so I decided to skip it. This week though I have a few words to say about the path towards block production (not there yet, but getting closer). Some this is a boring process, I procrastinated some too, diving into various topics with some interesting performance improvements and new learnings.

I started the week thinking about the mechanics of shard segment commitment into the global history of the beacon chain. If you recall from previous updates, we already had a pretty good idea of how the information about child shard segments flow up to the beacon chain, but there were still a few questions that were really bugging me.