Taraxa Tech Update — Week 19

More fixes and updates delivered to Taraxa’s Testnet.

As we’re moving closer to the next release of Aphrogenes Testnet, we stay focused on the network’s stability and core consensus.

PBFT Consensus and Execution Schedule.

Efficient proposals enable Taraxa’s PoS to produce fair and non-coordinated block proposals, which is essential for the network’s security. This week, we’ve implemented an important improvement to the PBFT state machine:

Simplified the voting next round in two states — the finish state and the finish polling state. This eliminates the overlap state operation and makes each single PBFT state independent.
Sent out the pull request, now ready for merging into the master branch.

Throughput optimization

We make use of the DAG topology to maximize the network’s throughput by enabling the rapid finalization of the block DAG. Among things done on this front:

Implemented changes in the network and full node test to simplify tests and move repetitive code in the util section.
Work-in-progress: making the tests run faster by significantly reducing the DAG and PBFT block proposal time, which causes some of the tests to fail.
Work-in-progress: looking for bugs in the tests and in the actual code to figure out what exactly causes those fails.

Concurrent EVM

Taraxa’s concurrent virtual machine sends the concurrent execution schedules to the core consensus layer enabling the rapid validation without executing the entire contract to maximize transaction processing and validation. Done this week:

Clean-ups and refactoring in the node and Taraxa-Aleth for the CPP-Ethereum fork.
Work-in-Progress: integrating the go API in the node.
Work-in-Progress: tests for the node code related to executing transactions and managing executed blocks.