Blocksmith

Blocksmith is a design RFC for a scalable Eth2 blockchain client.

See Eth2 specification at: https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs

It is a refactoring proposal for NBC (https://github.com/status-im/nim-beacon-chain) with the following features:

• Service/Actor-like architecture with communication between services done by message-passing
• Loose-coupling between services
• Defined and restricted capabilities per service
• Multithreaded services.

The RFC has the following goals:

• be a support document for future development, audits, testing, fuzzing and documentation efforts.
• propose a direction for the codebase and gives more structure as it has so far grow in an organic way.

Proposed architecture for Eth2 phase 0

The architecture is detailed in architecture_phase0.md

Services

The HotDB service is detailed in hotdb.md. It is in charge of providing:

• a cache for the direct acyclic graph (DAG) of blocks since the last finalized block.
• a cache for some intermediate states of the DAG so that we can recompute a certain state within a memory and CPU budget.

The Rewinder service is detailed in rewinder.md It is in charge of all operations that are applied to a certain state of the blockchain:

• validating a block
• validating an attestation
• producing a new block