Rutile weekly news #4

New week new goodies! We’ve been doing a lot of research regarding the serverless functions and getting consensus on the state.

⛓ Directed Acyclic Graph

We’ve been working hard on the passing of state around in the DAG. It’s known in DAGs it’s hard to create an order of what order the state should be executed. In order to solve this, we are following the circuit approach. That means that the state flows through the references of transactions. This, of course, still creates an asynchronous order. For this milestones exist. The milestones will create finality of the order by referencing all the transactions that interacted with that address and squashing the state.

You could argue why not immediately put the transactions in the milestone, which is a very valid point. Definitely, in the smart contract world, there is no margin for error and all interactions should always have a logical order to them without any asynchronous state. But Rutile tries to help both smart contract users and website builders. For websites, most interactions do not have to have a logical order to them. What is important is that the request is recorded and included in the final state. As a user, you want fast feedback that the network acknowledged your request and be certain that it will be included.

In the smart contracts case or when a website has a feature that absolutely requires order it can use the milestones to be certain the state has been squashed. This way both websites and smart contracts can function on the Rutile network.

We’ve created a small drawing that shows you how the network will function in the case of likes on a social network:

As you can see all likes are recorded in the end. This technic is not new, it’s used in most websites today to handle huge loads. We use it in Rutile to allow any website to scale to huge amounts without a hassle.

🖥 Rutile Virtual Machine

We’ve added support for growing memory. This allows Rutile to handle bigger applications. Each memory expansion is paid for so it incentives applications to write memory-efficient applications allowing nodes to process more requests.

📦 IPFS

Jurgen has been working on the IPFS layer and have the node up and running. Currently, we are in the research phase of how we can best incentive nodes to include files and make sure files stay in the network as long as there is paid for. Stay tuned on the progress!

We hope you enjoyed this weekly newsletter. If you have any questions please feel free to ask them!