Technical Update 21

Published in

Fantom Foundation

2 min readMay 4, 2020

Since our last technology update, we are proud to announce that Application BlockChain Interface (ABCI) functionality has been successfully added to Lachesis. This means our consensus engine can take advantage of all of the functionality that Tendermint has, thus increasing the usability of our consensus in many ways.

As described by Tendermint:

“The application interface, called the Application BlockChain Interface (ABCI), enables the transactions to be processed in any programming language. Unlike other blockchain and consensus solutions, which come pre-packaged with built in state machines (like a fancy key-value store, or a quirky scripting language), developers can use Tendermint for BFT state machine replication of applications written in whatever programming language and development environment is right for them.”

We will have a separate article explaining what ABCI is, and its implication for the Fantom ecosystem.

Elsewhere, the team has made great progress in building our Ledger application functionality with our new Progress Web Application wallets. Connor Hughes, a member of our marketing team, recently made a walkthrough here.

We have also continued to extend our Lachesis functionality. Some of the highlights include the following:

Go-Lachesis and SFC

Continued: Established deprecation and versioning policy for nodes on the Fantom mainnet: https://github.com/Fantom-foundation/go-lachesis/pull/471
Modified readme files, migrated genesis configs to releases directory: https://github.com/Fantom-foundation/lachesis_launch/pull/14
Added tps metrics in api: https://github.com/Fantom-foundation/go-lachesis/pull/476
Created a plan for the establishment of a daily report of the moderator node about Lachesis’s operational integrity
Continued: Implementation of general principles of governance module (acceptance of votes, counting of votes, deposit system): https://github.com/devintegral4/fantom-sfc/tree/governance
Completed conversion of ABCI-method function arguments to Tendermint types: https://github.com/Fantom-foundation/go-lachesis/pull/478

fantom-api-graphql

Added total and available delegation limits info to staker: https://github.com/Fantom-foundation/fantom-api-graphql/commit/2ac9d274d955a779c603e844862ff5653591e3da
Added estimated rewards calculation to the API: https://github.com/Fantom-foundation/fantom-api-graphql/commit/ba0bbe45d75e7cf49063a011e9ec9b5e2259ca4f
Added rewards estimation endpoint to the schema: https://github.com/Fantom-foundation/fantom-api-graphql/commit/b911f927fb0f05b2b2cf4f267981abe14d3c62bf

fantom-ledger

Created unified UI labels text case across functions: https://github.com/Fantom-foundation/fantom-ledger/commit/a82d5cdc2458835b4d7e7eadb4b31a4b5186b9c6
Adjusted Smart Contract Alert message on tx signing: https://github.com/Fantom-foundation/fantom-ledger/commit/0def4f6195923e44c1922308950e3a24698822fe
Removed DEBUG tag from the Makefile: https://github.com/Fantom-foundation/fantom-ledger/commit/e21bc6428679fdc9bfceb2e2446a09e2a585eab8
Enabled WebUSB support in Makefile: https://github.com/Fantom-foundation/fantom-ledger/commit/88068e798cf03c8673a3615efa0392c11e3c2ddc

fantom-metamask

Created various UI views for the PWA wallet: https://github.com/Fantom-foundation/fantom-metamask/commits/master

Research and Development

Updated Nano instrumentation analysis in Parity to analyze in-detail the performance of EVM and rocksDB database.
Researching the concept of “Optimistic Virtual Machines”.
Investigating the performance of Trie DB in the EVM. Building software to analyse its performance in more depth in the Opera network