Empowering Developers: The Power of Open-Source Shardeum Code
Shardeum will begin open-sourcing its groundbreaking source code and deliver on its commitment to enable decentralization for...
Shardeum will begin open-sourcing its groundbreaking source code and deliver on its commitment to enable decentralization for...
We are pleased to announce that Shardeum will begin open-sourcing its source code today and deliver on its commitment to enable decentralization for everyone. The GitLab code repos will be released in a phased manner. The project intends to open source all the repositories by the time it reaches mainnet in Q2 of 2023. It would also be helpful to note the project source code contains a significant amount of TypeScript. Ok, so are you ready to contribute to the development of Web3’s groundbreaking source code? I am sure you are! Let’s see which code bases are open-sourced to the public at this time so you can start accessing and developing them.
Shardeum is launching its code release by open-sourcing validator-related repositories considering the community has started running validator nodes for the first time after its betanet Sphinx launch. Here is the list of repositories (along with a summary) that the public/community can view, edit and maintain eventually.
operator-cli ‘binary’ to the validator container.Keep this in mind initially
Also, developers can report bugs on the network through the bug reporting repo – https://github.com/Shardeum/shardeum-bug-reporting
Keep reading to understand why this is significant for the larger ecosystem.
Shardeum’s open-source launch follows the project’s efforts to walk the talk by publicly demonstrating linear scalability and auto-scalability along with its testnet releases in 2022. Note, Shardeum is the first Web3 network that scales linearly, allowing it to overcome the blockchain trilemma and maintain low transaction fees forever.
The EVM-based smart contract platform will be the first to achieve some of the most pivotal attributes for the blockchain industry this decade. Bitcoin introduced a high degree of decentralization and security in the financial world and beyond. Ethereum took the blockchain industry to another level by introducing smart contracts that resulted in the creation and development of decentralized applications or DApps across multiple industries, from finance to the supply chain. Shardeum aims to achieve mass adoption of Web3 through its project.
And why is that groundbreaking? Decentralization today is limited in scope and scalability. That is because, as Ethereum’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, notes, blockchain networks cannot have all three core properties – security, decentralization, and scalability – coexist on them (also known as blockchain/scalability trilemma). As the first-generation blockchains USP was in its security in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, they had to make a trade-off between scalability and decentralization.
As a result, these platforms, including the more recent ones, ended up scaling vertically as opposed to horizontally, which, in turn, resulted in two major consequences that prevented the blockchain industry from gaining mass adoption. Once TPS or throughput capacity of a network is throttled during peak demand, it causes repeated outages and very high transaction fees. Two, limited scalability meant Web3 (a decentralized iteration of the internet enabled by technologies like blockchain) couldn’t compete with its centralized Web2 peers, let alone replace it.
Remember, the negative effects of centralization, such as data abuse, privacy abuse, and censorship, among others, were the catalysts for decentralization to start with. While Web3 has admirably come a long way in spite of targeted attacks by traditional/legacy institutions, solving the scalability trilemma is the long-standing puzzle for mass adoption. And it is a huge challenge considering the distributed and peer-to-peer nature of operations carried out in a public blockchain network. Shardeum’s mission involves onboarding billions of people to Web3 this decade and enabling decentralization in our societies.
Through its advanced and innovative protocol! In February 2022, following the launch of the project, Shardeum took steps to protect its innovative technology by filing for defensive patents. One of the motivations behind this was to establish a solid foundation upon which the public could build, with the ultimate goal of open-sourcing the code to facilitate further improvements. As the co-founders said during the launch of the project, they are motivated by the value it adds to the Web3 ecosystem (more than the competition) facilitated through an open, collaborative, and community-driven approach (OCC). So what X factor does Shardeum have to scale up the ecosystem? Linear scalability.
While you can go through the details in this blog, let me summarize the answer for you here. On Shardeum, consensus and processing are done at the transaction level and not at the block level. And, through dynamic state sharding, the network will use dynamic allocation to shard its state, ensuring an even distribution of compute workload, storage, and bandwidth among all nodes based on the current workload. This allows for not only parallel processing of transactions but also very low overhead for validator nodes as they will store only the state data of transactions they are involved in. Shardeum will further ensure atomic and cross-shard composability.
With this in place, every node added to the network will increase the transaction throughput instantly. So, by simply adding more nodes from the network’s ‘standby’ validator pool during peak demand, the TPS will increase proportionally, making Shardeum the first Web3 network to scale linearly. And this is the main X factor that impacts every other outcome on a blockchain network favorably, including throughput, decentralization, security, and constant transaction fees, irrespective of the demand in the network. Further, the consensus algorithm on Shardeum will prevent 51% attacks through auto-rotation of the active validators, gossip protocol, receipt generation after reaching consensus, and staking/slashing.
After its successful alphanet ‘Liberty’ release with 1.5+ million transactions and 45k+ smart contracts deployed by the community, Shardeum launched betanet ‘Sphinx’ on the project’s 1st anniversary – 02-February 2023. Along with the demo of the core features last year, including EVM compatibility, it is noteworthy to mention that Liberty’s release saw the network being state sharded with cross-shard composability, introduction, and automation of EIP 2930 with a TPS capacity of 100.
Prior to the Sphinx release, the project team demonstrated automated access list generation (AALG) in a sharded network and running a node on the testnet through GUI interface. Most blockchain networks have CLI interface including Shardeum however Shardeum developer team felt that operating a node has to be beginner friendly in order for average users to run validator nodes on the network. Through GUI, anyone can run a node with a few clicks of a button.
Remember, we talked about Shardeum scaling linearly and horizontally. Since validator nodes on the network will have to store only the state data of transactions they are involved in, as opposed to the full history, they can easily run a node with minimal hardware requirements on Sphinx. The project envisions growing horizontally, driven by the community. It stems from the project’s conviction that true decentralization and innovation are possible only when the community takes center stage on any Web3 platform.
The project team would like to express its sincere thanks to the community (which has grown to 400,000+ in little over a year) for relentlessly helping us to stress test the testnets by creating Shardeum accounts, deploying contracts, building DApps, and enabling users to transact non-stop. We now look forward to your support in developing the codes you will find in the above-mentioned repositories. You can further stay tuned to the official announcement regarding open-sourcing other Shardeum repos over time.
Let’s enable decentralization for everyone together as one community. Join, operate, and build on Shardeum today!
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