The first Scorex-based testnet, Lagonaki, combines the Permacoin consensus protocol implementation with a simple, Nxt-like payments module. After Lagonaki, the next Scorex-based testnet will be Ergaki, a block chain system that will be used as a public and performant bulletin board for various protocols including voting and auctions. The components of Ergaki are the following:

1. A new Proof-of-Work scheme based on RollerChain. By default, nodes will follow a "rational behavior", and will remove blocks that are not needed for Proof-of-Work mining. Potentially, a scheme like Ghost/Spectre or Bitcoin-NG/ByzCoin will be used to increase the system's troughput.

2. A new transactional module where state will be comprised of boxes…

A Scorex application is comprised if core, and Scorex itself is the core functions and module interfaces, and modules. The current testnet, Lagonaki, is made of Permacoin consensus protocol implementation and a simplest Nxt-like payments module. Next testnet release will be called Ergaki. It will be truly experimental and innovative blockchain system intended to be a performant…

This article is inspired by my recent visit to a blockchain technology conference and my discussions with colleagues about ideas to improve blockchain. Most of the conference speakers were from big Russian banks and their talks were about blockchain use cases, mainly as databases or smart contract platforms. However, none of the speakers were able to answer the question, ‘why…

Our paper "Improving Authenticated Dynamic Dictionaries, with Applications to Cryptocurrencies" will appear at the Financial Cryptography 2017 conference in Malta in April. It was also presented at the Real World Crypto 2017 conference in New York and I highly recommend watching the impressive presentation from Leonid Reyzin, professor of computer science at Boston University…

Log-Structured-Merge trees (LSMT) are a good fit for modern SSD storage and offer good performance and reliability. LSMT are also a good fit for blockchain storage requirements (snapshots, consistency, proof of existence). This blog post describes a database designed specifically for blockchain storage, inspired by existing LSMT implementations (RocksDB, COLA tree).

The current state-of-the-art LSMT implementation is probably RocksDB, with in-memory write buffers, parallel compaction and snapshots. Another similar algorithm are COLA tree. That is a btree-like structure where each node has separate write buffer. Finally there is SSTable from Cassandra…