Blog

Overall, I am really happy with the progress I’ve made this week. I’ve been mainly focused on unravelling one of the papers that I mentioned in my last update, Proof-of-Stake Sidechains. While is true that we don’t want our system to have anything to do with PoS, and there is no 1:1 matching of the concepts from the paper with what we are trying to build, the paper presents a framework that can come pretty handy to evaluate the correctness of our designs. This paper is from 2018, and after a first pass the first thing that I did is to check if there were any follow-up papers that built upon the abstractions of this paper. I came across Proof-of-Work Sidechains from the same authors, but without a doubt, the most complete proposal is the one that I started with. Let’s dive right into it.

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.

I want to kick-off my first weekly update in the project thanking Nazar for the warm welcome and the opportunity to work with him on this exciting project.

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.

The most important progress from last week is initial work on transactions. I’ve spent quite some time thinking about the design and even implemented an initial wallet contract alongside with related infrastructure.

It was a challenging week working on storage access checks for slots, but it is over, and I’m quite happy with how things are looking right now. Some extra refactoring also allowed running tests under Miri and spotted some things that violate the Rust safety rules.

Last week felt a bit less productive with a lot of time spent thinking about how to approach slots conflict resolution in the native execution environment, but still managed to land a few improvements, especially on the documentation side. Also conducted four separate interviews.

After a lot of refactoring and preparation, native execution environment is finally functional and can be used for purposes like writing tests and debugging.

Last week was busy with refactoring with the primary goal of being able to run contracts in test execution environment. The environment is not quite ready yet, but a lot of progress was done, and it’ll hopefully be ready next week.

Last week was busy on various improvements for contracts infrastructure, trying to clarify existing API and ensuring everything that might be built is actually possible. First system contracts were introduced, trait support was added and more, below is a recap of key updates.