nazar-pc

This was a lighter week on meaningful changes, but there are still few things to share. First of all, last week’s block import was (and still is) and incomplete prototype, but this week it was extended to become a bit more complete. I was also working on bringing up more components frm Subspace, including farmer, which lead me to attempt GPU plotting in Rust, so let’s get into it.

There was no update last week again since I didn’t feel like there was enough to share at the time, but now that more things have settled I’d like to share what I’ve been busy with.

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.

The question might seem somewhat obvious: you have a header and a body with transactions, many blockchains have it, what might be so difficult about it? Well, as I mentioned in the previous update, there are some complications and part of the challenge is related to the fact that we’re dealing with sharded architecture, which most blockchains don’t need to deal with.

The discussions with Alfonso and attempts to start building an actual blockchain led to spending a big part of last week working on block structure. That work is not done yet. However, I like to have some sort of accomplishment at the end of the week if possible, so I spent some time to finally implement the formatting of addresses, which will be the main part of this update.

This week was very similar to the last one with a bunch of refactoring in cleanups. There were important archiver improvements/fixes (depends on point of view) and more work on Merkle Trees. Two more crucial crates were moved from subspace to crates.

The last week was lighter on major changes, but there was a lot of cleanups and refactoring done to prepare Subspace components reuse for building a new blockchain from scratch. Also some improvements based on new developer feedback.

Most blockchain implementations are pieces of software that include the logic to support many different roles/features, possibly all at once: bootstrap node, block producer, RPC node, archival node, light client, etc. That is one way to do it, but one thing I learned over the years is that you can do a lot of interesting optimizations if you can apply additional constraints during the design phase. So why is basically everyone trying to combine all into one? Let’s consider different roles separately first and see what is special or interesting about them.

Last time I mentioned that I was looking into Merkle Trees to replace KZG. This week it happened, the whole codebase is basically free from KZG. The only place that is not fully fixed and where I am looking for help is GPU plotting, it broke with all these changes and isn’t the highest priority for me to fix right now.

Last week was lighter on code changes and more heavy on research. Specifically, I’ve been looking into commitment schemes generally and Blake3 hash function in particular, which was already used in the codebase, but turns out can be applied in more interesting ways than just a hash function.