Blockchain at Splunk: Reddit Scaling Challenge

Splunk’s Final Dashboard for Reddit Scaling Challenge

This post is a flashback to Splunk’s Blockchain team’s participation in the 2020 Reddit Scaling challenge:

In conjunction with the Ethereum Foundation, Reddit is inviting Ethereum scaling projects to show the community how your scaling solution can be used to bring Community Points to mainnet. Our goal is to find a solution that will support hundreds of thousands of Community Points users on mainnet today, and can eventually scale to all of Reddit (430 million monthly users).

We’ve evaluated some of the most promising scaling solutions, and have learned a few things:

1. There are plenty of awesome projects that we don’t know about yet. We seem to learn about a promising new scaling solution every day.
2. Most existing scaling solutions focus on the exchange use case, which favors optimizing for transfers. Many of these designs don’t take into consideration the costs of obtaining tokens or entering the scaling system, which can be significant. Community Points distributions have cost an order of magnitude more gas than all other operations combined, primarily due to on-chain storage costs associated with onboarding new users.
3. It’s unclear how to determine the best solution. There is a lot of code, a lot of documentation, and a lot of hype out there. But there are very few objective real-world reviews or comparisons of various products/implementations.
4. It’s unclear how to determine the best solution. There is a lot of code, a lot of documentation, and a lot of hype out there. But there are very few objective real-world reviews or comparisons of various products/implementations.
5. We need the Ethereum community’s help to figure this out.

As part of this challenge, our team collaborated with the xDai team to provide visualization and monitoring on their continuous load testing. This demonstrated their ability to deliver the throughput Reddit required of sending moon and brick tokens to their users in an effective manner.

With this collaboration, astonishing results were achieved as it resolved data availability, gas cost, and congestion issues. With real-time and historical data shown through our dashboards, data transparency was also attained.

Details about our solution can be found in our submission on Reddit, xDai Challenge Post, and a video walkthrough.

We learned a lot about our own capabilities during the process. We’re still on a journey to discover how we can help our customers with better real-time ledger analytics.

What would you like to see next? Email us at blockchain@splunk.com to get in touch.