Taraxa Project Update: 2019–05

Steven Pu

Published in

Taraxa Project

4 min readJun 25, 2019

Technical Update

Set up testnet analytics framework, wrote test scripts to scale up to thousands of nodes
Improved transaction queue concurrency with shared mutex
Conducted extensive experimentation to improve network diameter and block efficiency
Optimized block DAG synchronization
Adjusted the Fuzzy Sharding algorithm, began implementation and tuning
Began integration of VM into the ledger
Began building the RPC layer (according to ETH specifications)
Completed finalization chain VRF-PBFT state machine
Integrated PBFT finalization process into the ledger
Up next: continue to test and tune the testnet including input parameters governing fuzzy sharding and large-scale voting, VM integration, concurrency research

We’re on track to hit our milestones for the second quarter of 2019 on our roadmap for an internal testnet, and will work hard to release the test results as soon as we feel the network has stabilized. Going forward we will also commit to a weekly technical update to give our community more transparency into our development process and progress.

Community Update

We’ve concluded our first mini world tour of Berlin, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Singapore. This was the first time Taraxa went on a publicity tour, we made many new friends and learned a lot from everyone we met.

In Berlin, we met up with many old friends from Longhash (thanks Jasmine and her team for putting together such an awesome meetup, conference and hackathon), and the MXC project (Sheen and his awesome team pioneered decentralized LoRa traffic bidding). We received a great deal of encouragement on our concurrent VM research from Peter of the Web3 Foundation and Fabian, the co-creator of the ERC20 standard, and Yaron from the Kyber Network. Thanks everyone for your words of support!

Taraxa participating in Longhash’s CryptoCon, speaking on a panel about blockchain and machines

In Tokyo, we ran through a marathon of three meetups. We presented to a delegation of MBA students from Columbia Business School led by Professor Mattan Griffel on the basics of blockchain technology and use cases. We had a great study session on blockchain’s IoT use cases with the Stanford GSB Club of Japan and met up with a large group of fellow Stanford alumni interested in blockchain’s industrial use cases in telecommunications, media, infrastructure, and finance. Finally, we held a technical meetup at Neutrino’s Tokyo branch, sharing the stage with Kenichi-san from Nayuta, a major Lightning Network developer and node operator.

Taraxa’s Tokyo tech meetup at Neutrino with Nayuta

In Shanghai, we partnered with Longhash and Hashbang to host a technical meetup at Neutrino’s Shanghai branch, meeting a large group of blockchain enthusiasts from IoT, gaming, supply chain and finance.

Taraxa’s technical meetup in Shanghai with Longhash & Hashbang

In Singapore, Longhash helped to organize a meetup at WeWork, and we had the honor of sharing the stage with Yaoqi, CTO of Zilliqa, Calvin from Hashgraph, and Diego representing Tezos to discuss the next generation of blockchain technology. We were able to then deliver an in-depth explanation of the Taraxa protocol’s innovations. In the ensuing DLT Compass conference, Steven took to the stage at a panel discussing how small startups could effectively collaborate with large corporations, drawing upon his years of experience founding startups as well as advising multinational executives as a strategy consultant.