Constellation June Update
Tags: Ethereum, Blockchain Technology, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Distributed Systems

Hello Constellation Community,

By a long long shot, it has been the busiest and most eventful month for Constellation since our inception. First and foremost, we have tokens! Minting happened last week and we now have 4B Constellation DAGs in existence. For those that missed it, we released a detailed distribution model document over the weekend with a token percentage breakout across founders, advisors and the community. With minted token in wallets, Thursday and Friday were spent busily taking our first round investors and partners through the KYC/AML process. We have the process down and we’re ready for the wider community involvement when our first AirDrop hits July 7th.

Have you seen our Telegram Group lately? Over the past three weeks, we’ve been steadily increasing by around 300 new members a day and we’re nearing 20K. Altif has been busily expanding the community by onboarding Portuguese, Russain and Mandarin channels not to mention managing an already 6K strong AirDrop group. As our global footprint grows this will be reflected in our community strategy.

Read on for some topline updates from our engineering, marketing and leadership team. There’s so much more we’d like to talk about (Orion community portal wink wink) but we’re keeping our cards close until we’re ready to reveal. Hold on until next week.

Engineering Update

This week marks the start of regular tech updates from the Engineering team. Wyatt (CTO) Preston (Distributed Systems Engineer) and Ryle (VP of Engineering) recap some of the latest p wins from the week past. If you’re interested in learning more of questions on the specifics hit up the team on TG and we’ll get back to you.

Ryle, VP of Engineering

We created adaptors for Java crypto classes to make them compatible with Twitter’s Chill Scala Kryo serialization library in preparation for switching off Java serialization. We were temporarily using Java serializers for peer to peer communications (which is standard in Akka and works easily with our crypto libs) but that carries with it security risks. Kryo is much safer and faster but requires some custom modifications for public key serialization. We started preparing simple Algebird integrations (Sketch Map, HyperLogLog, MinHasher) for demonstrating approximate frequency estimations and set operations for transaction and id hashes alongside more generic refactoring/cleaning of code. We’ve added much higher transaction counts to the tests so we can start getting performance measurements and validation of internal buffering mechanisms. We’ve Tuned of Akka threading parameters and added more API endpoints for simplifying some of the tests which can pull some simple metrics / data from the node. We have started inputting some metrics to a prototype of a node dashboard page (served from the same API with a simple Scalatags / Scala.js example). We’ve been busy refactoring peer authentication protocols and adding reputation configuration endpoints and storage structures. We created the basic schema for our Fiber Bundle classes and some demonstrations of recursion traversals to extract transactions / ids / arbitrary data from bundles. Very importantly we’ve created a basic structure for handling different types of network conflict cases for preparations with integrations between gossip protocols and the new consensus updates. More schema updates oriented around votes, conflict detections, and proofs. Finally, we handled several complex Kryo serialization test cases to verify correctness.

Wyatt, CTO

I defined our finite state machines in terms of cellular autamata. This allows us to continuously tune the parallelism of nodes; more cells, more network contribution. Specifically, this amounted to an implementation of hylomorphic and metamorphic methods for encapsulating concurrent IO operations. I defined a monadic execution context as a cell in a cellular complex, which allows us to properly scale the distribution of processing tasks and exploit combiner based aggregations. These combiner based aggregations were defined in terms of a functor algebra and dual coalgebra, which means that the configuration space (set of possible states) that any cell can hold can be stitched together with any other cell’s configuration space to create a smooth embedding of their states.

Preston, Distributed Systems Engineer

I refactored the consensus actor to be simpler to understand and removed unnecessary state message passing between internal actors. Updated consensus to be able to be used within our different consensus round contexts. Previously it was only working in the checkpointing context now it also handles more generically both the “checkpoint” and “conflict” context.

Spec Rationality Handbook

Our partners at Spec-Rationality have written a thorough analysis of Constellation. Get ready to dig deep with competitor comparisons and infographics detailing our Hylochain architecture. This handbook will be updated regularly with, so don’t forget to bookmark it!

http://spec-rationality.com/constellation/

Constellation 101 Articles

We’re releasing our series of Constellation 101 articles this week. Constellation 101 will break down the basics, providing an accessible overview of our technology. What is a DAG exactly? What is the difference between Proof of Meme and Proof of Work? We understand the community has varying levels of technical knowledge and our updates can be very detailed. As we grow expect overviews and content to satisfy the curious all the way to the rock star developer. If you want a specific topic tackled jump into TG and let us know.

Recent Press and Interviews

Zac and Altif caught up with Crypto Beadles at Crypto Invest in LA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3oxDgVlmj0

We linked up with the inimitable Crypto Lark for an energetic conversation with Wyatt and Brendan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5vmd8QLuZU&t=1835s

Our friends over at Blockchain Brief produced a thorough video review breaking down our core principles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=86J5u8i0D74

Brendan weighed in on the dangers of centralization and the “emerging plutocracy”. The interview has been doing the rounds and caused quite the stir.

Our Korean friends at Blockchain Garage helped us translate our white paper. Thank you to Seonghoon Ju and the team. Video review to come soon.

Have a great week!

Constellation Team