Implementation Status and Roadmap

8.1 Current baseline

As of 2026-10-08, this repository contains a Rust 2024 workspace with:

• canonical shared types and bounded decoder primitives;
• standard BLAKE2s-256 and strict Ed25519 backends, canonical transaction commitments, and state-aware signed admission;
• normalized access leases and dependency-preserving greedy execution-wave planning;
• compileable interfaces for cryptography, genesis, transactions, PoTB committees, BFT votes, state, runtime, execution, persistence, synchronization, P2P, RPC, configuration, keystore, telemetry, and node coordination;
• a tested in-memory mempool reference policy, genesis validation, configuration secret redaction, quorum arithmetic, decoder boundary helpers, and workspace integration invariants;
• authenticated double-vote evidence, bounded durable validator evidence outboxes, offline evidence CLI verification, experimental deterministic scoring and an explicit PoTB producer profile with canonical inclusion, active age weights, quorum admission and authenticated recovery, with daemon activation and RPC/CLI/DNS verification;
• bounded finalized-block history RPC for read-only explorers, alongside status and account reads;
• an allocation-free Rust contract SDK with tested wasm32 host bindings and bounded offline source-package reconstruction;
• an on-chain DNS registry with owner-authorized leases and a certified-proof resolver;
• operator CLI with genesis verification, validator/devnet provisioning and a native-payment wallet, a network-capable daemon, and pinned Rust contract build/source verification tools;
• CI, dependency-policy automation, contribution templates, project governance documents, and engineering specifications;
• a block production pipeline (BlockProducer) that coordinates mempool selection, deterministic execution, and storage commitment;
• a local demonstration service (FullNodeService) that simulates finality while coordinating execution and storage;
• a daemon with both local demonstration and certified fixed-committee network modes, bounded peer exchange, payment gossip, protected signing recovery, and RPC status tied to durable commits.

The repository now runs a certified reference network for native payments and fixed-committee BFT across independent daemon processes. A reference CLI wallet supports offline signing and real RPC submission. Live genesis-v2 VRF rotation, standby participation and verified client catch-up are implemented. Live PoTB activation is implemented. Bounded historical state indexing and quorum capacity/fee governance are implemented. Explicit bounded history export and pinned recovery are implemented; automatic retention remains open. Certified state and receipt queries, authenticated finality waiting, on-chain DNS and bounded source-package tooling are implemented. Verified VRF selection, the WASM runtime and signed contract activation are implemented; see VRF, runtime and contracts. See network setup and current limits.

8.2 Component status

8.3 Removed architecture

The current design removes:

• C and C++ as first-party implementation languages;
• the C ABI as the primary module boundary;
• ALVM and its custom instruction set;
• Trocto, Regol, and Kreep contract languages;
• a general-purpose off-chain user storage/share service;
• claims that VRF is intentionally absent;
• historical implementation claims not represented by this Rust repository.

Validator-local persistence remains required and is named storage; it is not a user content service.

8.4 Planned milestones

M1 — canonical foundations

Canonical encodings, domain tags, hashing, addresses, signatures, checked resource arithmetic, golden vectors, property tests, and fuzz targets.

The codec now rejects alternate length prefixes and non-canonical receipt flags, and validates transaction structure before allocating owned fields. Regression coverage includes golden bytes, every supported sequence length, every receipt flag, truncations, and transaction byte mutations. The standalone fuzz package includes the accepted-input re-encoding invariant for transactions, state keys, and receipts. The version-1 transaction envelope adds signed expiry, explicit lane, and prices; transaction encoder output changes and old archives fail closed. See the current codec baseline.

Standard hashing and signing backends, signed transaction IDs, address derivation, and checked resource pricing are implemented with conformance tests. These replace incompatible placeholder cryptographic outputs; see suite and compatibility details. The daemon now supports explicitly selected authenticated fixed-committee networking; local mode retains demonstration certificates.

M2 — state and transactions

Signed envelopes, validation order, account/state commitments, immutable snapshots, proofs, diffs, sequential atomic commit, crash recovery, pruning, receipts, and snapshot exchange.

Implemented reference state commitments, membership and absence proofs, bounded versioned snapshots, atomic file-backed state publication, writer locks, recovery, verified snapshot exchange, and proposal rollback are described in state and recovery. Whole-chain archives now persist blocks, certificates, checkpoints, and historical state atomically. Local daemon block/state restart integration is implemented with process and differential recovery tests. Genesis activation creates committed account balances/nonces and validator weights, installs a durable height-zero anchor, and validates genesis identity on restart. Recovered accounts are tested against signed admission. Native payments implement sequential account transitions, fixed reference fees, atomic revalidation/publication, and daemon account/submission RPC with process restart tests. Versioned transaction policy is enforced at admission, proposal execution, and commit; expiry eviction follows successful durable publication. Durable consensus signing decisions now recover independently through the signing journal. Daemon signer integration and full-history certificate verification are implemented in the reference-network profile. Append-only chain storage removes whole-history rewrites and the archive checkpoint cap for new network directories, with legacy compatibility and fault/replay coverage. Quorum capacity/fee governance, bounded historical state indexing and explicit pinned history export are implemented. Automatic retention and a production durable database engine remain open.

M3 — deterministic runtime

Pinned Rust contract toolchain, target selection, validator, interpreter, host ABI, resource metering, SDK, reproducible artifacts, source verification, and differential execution.

M4 — parallel execution

Deterministic waves, Adaptive Execution Leasing, lanes, optimistic access validation, replay bounds, locality, fusion, prefetch, caches, pools, and signature batches.

Bounded execution-parent caching and borrowed-key wave planning are implemented with uncached/serial differential tests and deterministic read-count checks; scope and limits. Per-block worker reuse is implemented with thread-count and serial-equivalence checks; scope. Consecutive singleton-wave fusion, bounded declared-key prefetch and reusable worker result buffers are implemented with serial-equivalence checks; behavior and limits. These complete the reference execution optimization scope. Bounded parallel strict signature verification is implemented across every quorum path with deterministic failing-index reporting and serial-equivalence tests; scope and limits. It splits independent verifications across workers rather than reducing the work per signature. End-to-end throughput is not established by these functional checks. Per-operation cost is measured separately on one host, where 512 requests verify 5.7x faster at eight workers than at one; measurement method and limits.

M5 — consensus

PoTB transitions and evidence, audited VRF provider, unbiased weighted sampler, partial committee rotation, producer selection, prevote/precommit state machine, certificates, durable anti-equivocation, formal models, and adversarial simulations.

The authenticated finality layer verifies registered keys, chain/height/committee-bound vote digests, and weighted precommit certificates. The collector retains one round, rejects duplicate nil votes, distinguishes authenticated equivocation, and never combines weights across rounds or phases. Certified producer commits authenticate finality before existing execution/storage checks, with failed-write retry and restart verification tests. The durable signing journal now reserves a chain/genesis/key-bound decision before returning an Ed25519 signature, blocks stale coordinates, and recovers after process exit. Typed vote signing maps wire phases to protected journal coordinates. Protected journals now support bounded rollover, preserving their immutable prefix and inode lock while continuing past 100,000 decisions. The local BFT guard now verifies prevote proofs, preserves locks through nil votes/timeouts and restarts, and reserves locks atomically with signatures. Read-only producer validation and a payment/vote/certificate/archive integration test exercise execution before signing and publication after finality. Signed proposals and a reference participant now authenticate designation, persist proposal reservations, coordinate execution/voting/commit, and recover across round changes and failed storage writes. The reference network driver integrates daemon voting, timers, signer provisioning, durable available values, and certified synchronization. Mutually authenticated TLS 1.3 and independent transport provisioning are implemented; see transport security. Verified weighted VRF selection, authenticated handoff and rotating execution/recovery APIs are implemented; genesis-v2 daemon activation is implemented; production qualification remains open.

M6 — P2P and node

Authenticated encrypted transport, peer discovery, rate limits, compact blocks, finalized sync, bounded queues, pipelining, speculation, external RPC, telemetry, and finalized adaptive-capacity observations.

Non-voting full nodes now verify and serve certified history, re-execute imported blocks, relay payments, and recover without consensus keys. Observer provisioning and actual TLS/RPC process tests are implemented.

Owned response preparation and encoding are separated in both node roles. The daemon releases its node lock before encoding; scope and byte-equivalence tests. Incoming exchanges are decoded once in peer workers and retained in the bounded mailbox for processing against current node state; scope and equivalence tests.

Optional compact-block propagation, bounded detached execution, speculative local candidate preparation and next-height fetch are integrated with sequential voting and publication checks; behavior and qualification. Routine operations and reproducible metrics sampling have a runbook. Speculative execution/voting on uncommitted descendant state remains outside the reference profile. Automatic history retention is also unimplemented; the existing pinned export is an explicit offline operation with an independently retained checkpoint pin.

M7 — ecosystem

Wallet integration and DNS registry/resolver.

Native-payment CLI signing and a bounded RPC client are implemented/tested, including devnet funding, signature inspection, submission failure handling and real finalized account queries. Encrypted wallet custody, certified state/receipt queries, authenticated finality waiting and on-chain DNS are implemented/tested; see receipt behavior.

M8 — production gates

Distributed calibration, interoperability suite, long fuzz campaigns, reproducible releases, dependency audit, independent cryptography/consensus/runtime/security reviews, key ceremonies, and incident/operator runbooks.

Supported fixed/rotating wire histories retain 50 frozen compatibility fixtures. The explicit PoTB producer profile adds eight separate fixtures with authenticated replay and independent Python checks. The shared deterministic mutation corpus now uses 99 seeds and passes one million inputs; scope and live PoTB qualification.

The concise checklist and remaining-work split are maintained in ../ROADMAP.md. Security-related work, including alternate-runtime qualification and automated retention recovery design, is deferred. Linux and independent-machine release evidence remains outstanding; local Windows checks and configured CI jobs do not satisfy those external gates.

A dependency-free benchmark harness and per-crate micro-benchmarks now measure per-operation cost locally, covering part of the preliminary benchmark suite. Distributed calibration, latency percentiles and the confidence intervals a calibration report must state are not covered and stay release activities; method and limits.

8.5 Required continuous gates

Every protocol change must pass formatting, Clippy with warnings denied, unit/integration/doc tests, canonical serialization compatibility, cross-platform deterministic fixtures, documentation-link checks, and benchmark execution on both platforms. The benchmark gate establishes only that every declared benchmark still runs and none has silently stopped; it thresholds no duration and the hosted figures are not comparable; limits. Relevant changes additionally require property testing, fuzzing, recovery tests, and optimized/reference differential checks.

Unsafe Rust remains forbidden except in the dedicated wasm32 FFI module; documented binding review (../crates/contract-abi/SAFETY.md). CI currently covers Linux and Windows quality checks. Dependency policy, registry advisory lookup and the workspace-excluded fuzz package are checked by separate configured workflows; review and its coverage gaps.

8.6 Open decisions

Before production implementation, resolve:

1. Adversarial contribution/evidence availability and formal safety/liveness. Capacity/fee governance uses more than two thirds of incumbent weight with next-epoch activation; implementation. The live PoTB profile, candidate provisioning and incumbent-quorum admission CLI are implemented. Bounded delivery simulations cover both rotating profiles, validly signed Byzantine coalitions below the accountability threshold, membership churn crossed with delivery faults and adverse weight concentration. A bounded formal model checks agreement, lock safety, weighted accountability and bounded-round decision at one height. Unbounded safety/liveness and independent provider review remain open.
2. Alternative availability policies beyond the implemented complete-roster private-network profile.
3. Rotating weighted BFT lock, unlock, timeout, and handoff rules.
4. Versioned activation of future protocol changes; current encoding/hash compatibility is fixed by the literal corpus.
5. Cross-platform contract artifact qualification; bounded offline source reconstruction, ABI-v2 WebAssembly, its host SDK and Rust 1.99.0 builds are implemented.
6. Production state indexing and concrete durable chain database engine; the reference Merkle commitment is specified.
7. Transaction ordering, anti-MEV policy and lane borrowing; versioned fee governance is implemented.
8. Adaptive-capacity observation, manipulation resistance, and activation.
9. P2P transport, discovery, topology, identities, and denial-of-service bounds.
10. Deployment-specific DNS lease pricing; deterministic naming, ownership and lease rules are implemented.
11. Supported platforms, compatibility lifecycle, and maintainer authority. Detached release-manifest signing and offline verification are implemented; the release authority identity and its key ceremony are deliberately not invented here; workflow.

8.7 Non-negotiable correctness properties

• Finalized transaction order is unique at each height.
• A finality certificate represents voting power strictly greater than two thirds.
• Committee selection is publicly verifiable and proportional to finalized PoTB weight under the specified sampler.
• Parallel, sequential, speculative, fused, cached, AOT, JIT, SIMD, and portable paths agree.
• Adaptive capacity cannot be changed by one node's local measurements.
• Canonical state is published only after finality and execution commitments validate.
• Sync and snapshot imports remain staged until verified.
• Configuration and logs do not expose secret key material.
• Ecosystem services cannot access validator signing authority.