Conseil now has fork support

As decentralized systems, blockchains can experience forks for multiple reasons. Some of these are mundane byproducts of the consensus process itself while others happen due to drastic circumstances like network partitions, major software bugs or large-scale attacks. While the on-chain governance process of Tezos reduces some sources of major forks, the fundamental decentralized nature still leaves open the possibility of such events. As a result, it is important for tools and applications built on top of Tezos to be resilient to forks. Conseil, the indexer and API for Tezos blockchain data, now supports forks!

The indexing process within Conseil now periodically checks the history of the Tezos node it connects to against the history stored in its internal database using a binary search. When it detects a discrepancy, the process pauses, invalidates all data from the point of the fork and recreates all history from there. The invalidated data is not expunged but simply marked clearly for audit reasons.

Users of Conseil can now be confident that they always work with an authoritative history and, even if there are chain reorganizations, their applications will always show the valid data even in extreme cases where state actors attempt to disrupt the Tezos blockchain. Such resilience is quite important for building truly global and decentralized trustless systems.

For those technically inclined, the relevant Conseil pull requests are #885, #896, #898 and #899. A description of the fork detection and resolution algorithm can be found on the Conseil wiki.

As always, we are always happy to discuss anything Conseil related in our developers’ chat room.