nazar-pc

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.

Welcome post mentioned briefly initial set of constraints that led to the creation of this project, but I figured it might be helpful to have a short writeup about it that might be helpful for sharing. In short: we’re building a blockchain. By “we” I really mean just me and Alfonso so far, but I hope more people will join over time if they find it interesting.

The majority of last week I spent tinkering with Subspace codebase after importing it here in preparation for building an actual blockchain.

The majority of the last two weeks I’ve been busy with the installation of the antivirus system update for my immune system. It was neither pleasant nor quick, but now that it is slowly approaching 100%, I’m back with another update of what I managed to do since the last update.

The plan was to get to transaction pool implementation, but it didn’t quite happen. I did a lot of investigation around performance though. For example, transaction processing was several orders of magnitude slower than direct method calls without a transaction, which concerned me, but after optimizations of last week the difference is ~10x. And it makes sense given how much more work the wallet has to do on top of the method call itself.

The big change from the last update is that Alfonso de la Rocha has joined me as a part-time researcher to help with sharding designing. Code-wise, there were also a bunch of performance benchmarks and optimizations.