themelio-node: Themelio's reference implementation

Themelio is a new public blockchain focused on security, performance, and long-term stability. themelio-node is Themelio's reference implementation in Rust.

Overview

themelio-node is a highly concurrent program where different tasks are done by separate actors, which are "active" structs that own background async tasks or threads. They concurrently run and communicate both with other actors and with "plain data" types like Mempool. They are represented as green boxes in the following diagram illustrating the data flows of the whole program:

There are the following primary types in themelio-node:

• NodeProtocol is the core node actor. It implements the core auditor/full node logic: gossiping with other through the melnet-based auditor P2P network (via the themelio-nodeprot crate) to synchronize the latest blockchain state.
  • Pushes new blocks to Storage
  • Pushes new transactions to Mempool; they are only gossipped further if Mempool accepts them
  • Pulls data from Storage to gossip to other nodes
  • Pulls data from BlockIndexer to answer queries about coin lists (which coins do this address "own")
• BlockIndexer indexes "nonessential" information about blocks. It continually pulls blocks out of Storage, and indexes them, keeping track of information such as which coins do which address own.
• Storage encapsulates all persistent storage in the system. It is not an actor, so it does not initiate any data flows.
  • Stores data using meshanina (for sparse Merkle tree nodes) and boringdb (for blocks and other metadata)
  • Mempool is a non-persistent field that keeps track of the most likely next block. This is based on the existing blockchain state plus unconfirmed transactions seen in the network.
• StakerProtocol is the core staker actor, which is only started in staker mode. It runs the Streamlet consensus protocol (implemented in the novasymph crate) over a separate melnet P2P.
  • Pushes freshly finalized blocks, with their consensus proofs (a quorum of signatures), into Storage (where NodeProtocol will pick them up and gossip them)
  • When proposing a block, pulls a candidate from Mempool

Usage

Have a look in how-to-use.

Metrics

Themelio Labs runs a worldwide network of Themelio full nodes --- themelio-node can also be compiled to report metrics for this network.

Read here.