Gnosis client development team Joins Erigon (formerly Turbo-Geth) to Release Next-Gen Ethereum Client

Gnosis
OpenEthereum
Published in
3 min readJun 2, 2021

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While putting greater resources toward this effort, Gnosis will deprecate the OpenEthereum legacy codebase and work on a migration path for all existing users.

For the last year and a half, Gnosis has led the development of OpenEthereum, the second largest Ethereum implementation by node count, taking over the maintenance of this critical codebase.

During this time, OpenEthereum played an important role in being a key piece of infrastructure for some of the largest users in Ethereum like Etherscan and Gnosis Safe. Its tracing capabilities set it apart from other clients, ensuring reliable and fast synchronisation for data providers. However, its development has reached a point where it is no longer possible to implement the protocol improvements that are aligned with our vision.

As OpenEthereum’s stewards, our ability to prevent a consensus failure is limited by a 200.000-line codebase that is now over 5 years old and originally written by a team whose main focus has shifted away from Ethereum. A major codebase refactoring would be lengthy without solving the underlying issue of a monolithic architecture which hinders it from moving to our modular client vision.

With these factors in mind, we have decided to stop maintaining and supporting the codebase inherited from Parity Technologies, which we now call OpenEthereum 3.x, after the London upgrade scheduled for mid July 2021.

We recommend OpenEthereum 3.x users to migrate to the Erigon Ethereum client.

Benefits of the new Erigon client

Erigon (previously called Turbo-Geth) is a next generation Ethereum client that introduces several new concepts:

  • A modular client design, enabling parallelized development of the client
  • New (“flat”) model of storing Ethereum state, allowing a lower disk footprint
  • Preprocessing of data outside of the storage engine, making database write operations faster by a magnitude
  • Staged synchronization technique, allowing very fast synchronization

This brings the following benefits to the node operators:

  • Much lower disk footprint
    - 1.2TB for archive node, 430GB for pruned node.
  • Faster sync speed
    - >10 blk/s at tip, compared to <1blk/s for OpenEthereum.
    - An archive node can be bootstrapped in under 3 days.
    - Performance improvements allow Erigon to run even on HDD.
  • Crash resilience
    - Forceful shutdown or power failure cannot damage Erigon’s database.
  • New vision of modularity
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    P2P and web3 RPC services can be run as separate components on a remote machine.
  • Full support for OpenEthereum/Parity `trace_` API, including `trace_filter`

The transition to Erigon

Since joining forces in 2020, Gnosis and Erigon have been working together to make the transition as smooth as possible for users. After the London Upgrade, the Gnosis client team will join Erigon’s development efforts.

We have collaborated to ensure Erigon supports all the features OpenEthereum 3.x currently provides on Ethereum mainnet, including tracing.

“We took over OpenEthereum to support Ethereum 1.x development. Alexey has a great vision for Ethereum 1.x client development and assembled a great team to execute on this vision: Building a modular client allowing to scale development and increase the speed of innovation on many dimensions like sync speed and disk usage. We want to help Ethereum to push the limits of what is possible on Ethereum today and see Erigon as the foundation.

Stefan George, CTO Gnosis

Development Legos: A Note from Alexey Akhunov, founder of Erigon

We are looking forward to supporting the OpenEthereum users through the transition from the monolithic inherited codebase to an increasingly innovative and inclusive development based on common architecture.

We are already putting a lot of emphasis on filling existing functionality gaps between Erigon and OpenEthereum — these include tracing APIs and proof of authority algorithm AuRa currently powering the networks such as Kovan, Sokol, and xDAI.

These improvements will do more than fill the gaps — such functionality will fit into the overarching architecture for building Ethereum implementations. Some parts of this architecture are already quite clear, while others are still being figured out. We look forward to working together with Gnosis on bringing this new architecture to reality.

Alexey Akhunov, founder of Erigon

If you’re interested in developing the Erigon client with Gnosis, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us on on the OpenEthereum Discord, or Gnosis Discord at chat.gnosis.io.

To migrate to Erigon, check Erigon’s Github.

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