Welcome to Quai Network’s April Developer Roundup. This month, the PoEM consensus mechanism has been implemented, throughput and stability testing has been conducted, and Quai has been represented at Consensus 2023.
Core Protocol
With the conception and implementation of the PoEM consensus mechanism solving many outstanding issues, the core protocol has begun undergoing internal throughput and stability testing prior to the announcement of the Iron Age Testnet.
Proof-of-Entropy-Minima
Proof-of-Entropy-Minima, or PoEM, is a new consensus mechanism inspired by Proof-of-Work Nakamoto Consensus and Stephen Wolfram’s New Physics. PoEM eliminates the impact of latency and block propagation time on consensus, leading to a consistent event sequence that is unaffected by time. The time-invariant nature of PoEM consensus ensures that all nodes remain in consensus, even if they haven’t yet received relevant data or blocks. As a result, consensus is not achieved at periodic intervals within the network, but instead, is perpetually established as soon as nodes initiate the Quai protocol.
Proof-of-Entropy-Minima’s time-invariant consensus provides a variety of benefits over time-dependent consensus mechanisms like Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake, including instantaneous fork resolution and faster finality. These properties give PoEM the ability to coordinate an infinite number of execution shards.
Complete documentation describing and explaining the intricacies of the PoEM consensus mechanism will be released in the Quai Docs soon.
The PoEM pull request has been successfully merged into the Quai Network codebase, and is undergoing internal testing and benchmarking.
https://github.com/dominant-strategies/go-quai/pull/720
Throughput & Stability Testing
Internal testing of Quai Network after the implementation of PoEM has been immensely successful, offering a glimpse at the potential of the network.
All testing took place in a globally distributed, 10-node network with a 9-shard construction. Critically, due to PoEM, Quai is able to dynamically add execution shards as needed to fulfill demand. Thus, the current goal of testing in a 9-shard architecture is to optimize the throughput of each execution shard, minimizing the number of shards required to achieve global throughput.
The first throughput testing of PoEM occurred on April 13, 2023. Within this short ~2 hour test, Quai Network’s peak processing throughput was pinpointed at 2,591 TPS.
Assuming an even distribution of transactions across all execution shards, it can be estimated that the current construction of Quai Network can process ~275 TPS per shard.
“This [throughput test result] was achieved without any geographic organization. As we improve our tooling, we will see nodes organize geographically — this will reduce peer latency and hops per subnet, allowing us to hit even higher TPS numbers per shard without losing consensus. And obviously, if the network is willing to accept higher cross-shard settlement times, we can increase the number of shards in the network to achieve arbitrarily high network wide throughput.”
– John, VP of Engineering
The second test focused on both throughput as well as stability. Conducted from April 14th-17th, 2023, throughput was increased periodically as the test progressed. TPS was increased from 200 to 400, and finally to 600 for sustained periods of time to ensure that the network remained stable while processing increasingly more transactions per second. Nodes were also turned on/off and re-synced throughout this test, further reinforcing confidence in Quai Network’s resilience and reliability.
Throughput and stability testing is a critical step in ensuring confidence in a Testnet release.
Stateless Prime & Regions
As mentioned by Quai co-founder Dr. K in a University Call, Quai Network’s Prime and Region chains will no longer carry state. While they will still exist as header chains in order to facilitate cross-chain state transitions and coordinate sub networks, “holding state in Prime or Region has become superfluous” due to PoEM.
Consensus 2023
As an official sponsor of CoinDesk’s Consensus 2023, Quai Network has been represented through both a dedicated booth at the conference and by hosting the official closing party of the event.
Booth Sponsorship
Right across from the Consensus 2023 Main Stage, the Quai Network booth has been staffed by members of the Dominant Strategies team for the duration of the conference. In addition to knowledge about Quai, conference attendees have the opportunity to obtain a variety of Quai-themed merch to show their support.
Quai Network Presents: The Official Consensus Closing Party
In addition to the booth, Quai Network is also represented at the conference through “Quai Network Presents: The Official Consensus Closing Party.” The event will feature live music, an open bar, food, and an unmatched VIP experience hosted at downtown Austin’s premiere nightclub, Superstition.
Live musical performances from surprise special guests will bring the energy the entire night. For those looking for a more relaxing evening, Superstition also has private VIP spaces, a cocktail lounge, and a patio featuring reimagined classic cocktails for a more intimate experience.
The event will be hosted on Friday night from 8pm-2am CST. For more information about the Official Consensus Closing Party, visit the event posting on Eventbrite.
Content
The message of Quai Network has continued to spread through a combination of education and the Social Media Rewards Program.
University Calls
Efforts to educate the Quai community on revolutionary concepts like PoEM have been spearheaded by Quai co-founder Dr. K, who delivers bi-weekly lectures in the form of University Calls. These calls, hosted live in the Quai Discord, are also recorded and posted on YouTube for later viewing.
April’s University Calls focused largely on the new PoEM consensus mechanism and its ramifications to both Quai Network and the larger crypto industry.
An aggregation of important presentations, lectures, and university calls has been published in the Quai Documentation under “Academic Resources>Lectures & Presentations.”
Social Media Rewards Program
The Social Media Rewards Program, having been maintained for approximately a year, has successfully drawn attention towards the Quai Protocol. This April, the Quai Network Twitter achieved a milestone of 150,000 followers, and the Quai Discord is rapidly approaching 130,000 members.
While there are many refinements and improvements still to-come with the Social Media Rewards Program, usage of the Quai Dashboard has steadily increased since the beginning of the program, and the program continues to welcome new users every day.
Tooling
With the implementation of PoEM, some updates have been made to Iron Age tooling, including the dashboard wallet. Further, an internal tool is in development that will assist in the management of social media reward calculations and troubleshooting.
“We have been diligently working on incorporating PoEM updates into the wallet and snap. As we continue our internal integration testing, we are eager for the community to experience and engage with our tooling. Additionally, we have been developing an internal tool to streamline the management of housekeeping tasks related to the rewards program, further improving efficiency.”
– Kunal, Full-Stack Developer
Join us to build a better blockchain.
Quai Network is an open-source Proof-of-Entropy-Minima blockchain network utilizing the capabilities of merged mining to increase throughput and security. Users of Quai Network will enjoy fast transaction times without compromising decentralization and security. Miners will have competitive mining opportunities across the many blockchains within the network.
Capable of thousands of transactions per second, the Quai Network is a new solution to scalability that is soon to be ready for mainnet release.
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