Tony to Achain Community – Ours is a Journey towards the Stars

The public blockchain platform Achain announced to its community that they are entering the second phase of development. According to Achain’s roadmap, their planned time for entering phase two “Galaxy” is Q2 of 2018. In the open letter “Tony to Achain Community: Ours is a Journey towards the Stars”, the blockchain’s founder Tony Cui expressed his gratitude to the support Achain community has shown in the past and also calls for high participation and anticipation in the future.

Below is the full post of the Open Letter:

Dear Achain community, it’s been a great honour for me personally and the entire Achain team, to have such a vibrant and dedicated group of people following us through thick and thin. We have community members helping us with content localization, event organization and other marketing and community building efforts. Ours is a journey towards the stars. I am proud to say that we are finally ready, to enter Phase Two of Achain development: Galaxy.

First, let’s look at the advancements and progress we made in Phase one. With the completion of the Singularity Phase, we’ve built a stable and secure blockchain network. Our network has proven to be highly efficient at processing peaked transactions, where the transaction rate can reach as high as 1000 transactions per second. We’ve eliminated bugs and errors in both ACT transaction and other Achain platform token transactions. We also optimized LVM (the Lua Virtual Machine), which now provides smoother and more stable contract execution. A 2-layer cache was added to cope with impeding peak impacts. Other improvements we made include adding multi-asset apparatus to accelerate transaction speed, setting up a test environment for contract development and releasing a light version of the Achain Wallet.

We organized a number of technical discussions on a cross-chain solution, which we believe will be beneficial to everyone and everything in the Achain ecosystem. Through this, we can make transactions on Achain more secure. In addition, data sharing will break down the barriers for companies and create unprecedented business value. Next will be an intermediary chain that will be implemented to create the channel of token-to-token, token-to-data, and data-to-data exchanges between any blockchains cloned by Achain.

The Achain team is committed to building a boundless blockchain reality and is always working to improve and perfect the Achain global network.

Some of our notable successes include:

Contract optimization

We noticed a significant decline in contract performance after the launch of Cryptodogs in January. By analyzing Cryptodogs and the contract IO (input and output), we found some problems with data processing methods. The details are as follows:

1) An excessive amount of bytes from the synchronized block were written in the undo_state data structure, and many of them were repeated. Therefore, we optimized this process by getting rid of excessive reads and writes.

Total Bytes Read
Total Bytes Written
Before optimizations
726,331,640,520
617,472,796
After optimizations
483,589,115,347
32,046,116
Decline Rate
33.5%
95.8%

After the optimizations, the size of the synchronized block was about 1,800,000. That’s to say the total bytes written decreased by 95%. However, as this is not the main performance bottleneck, the processing speed only increased moderately.

2) There was redundant storage of the contract’s underlying data structure. Every time the contract was invoked, the chain had to send all contract data to the virtual machine, which is not as efficient as it could be. We optimized this process, which resulted in the following:

The average speed has increased from 72 b/s（block per second）to 185b/s and the synchronization time decreased from more than 7 hours to less than 2 hours as the block reaches 1864457. The processing time has been significantly reduced.

3) We added a local cache to improve the efficiency of smart contract executions for agents. There was only an L1 cache (the pending area) previously, which put great pressure on the agent as all transactions of the whole network would pile up in the pending area. Therefore, we added a local cache so that transactions will be stored there before entering the pending area. They are sent to the pending area when the agency is not stressed. In this way, skyrocketing volume won’t inhibit the agency.

Multi-asset development

We added a set of data structures on the chain, which enable the multi-asset storage as well as the creation, publishing and transfer of them. Users can publish their assets without publishing a corresponding contract, and the efficiency of multi-assets can rival that of ACT.

Lite Wallet

Since the launch of Achain, more than 2,300,000 blocks have been produced and it can take a long time to synchronize all data between nodes. The desktop wallet is a full client and users sometimes need to wait for an extended period of time for the data to be synchronized, which dampens user experiences. To address this we developed the Lite Wallet. The wallet doesn’t require local synchronization with the network. The transaction is conducted on Achain’s pre-synchronized servers, while being created, signed and broadcast locally (the private key is never stored or broadcast remotely). The Lite Wallet is both efficient and safe.

OS Support

To increase Achain’s utility, Achain needs to be compatible with different operating systems. Currently, Achain can be used on Windows, Mac OS, Ubuntu, CentOS and Fedora. In the future, it will also be supported by Oracle Linux and Debian.

GitHub Update

Lastly, some developers/investors were worried about GitHub updates. The primary concerns were in regards to the frequency of updates. There are actually 5 branches under the cover of Achain-Dev, however, some evaluation programs only chose the main branch for evaluation and scoring. In fact, we committed almost all code to the GitHub last September, which was a complete and feasible version as it was able to be successfully compiled. Since then the main branch was updated and most of the other branches such as the Achain_Linux were updated as well. Achain is 3 years old, updating it weekly would not mean diligence from our team, but shows that the code is faulty and incomplete.

We appreciate the developers’ concerns for wanting to inspect our code and we encourage them to directly reach out to our Achain development community for more information. We are happy to share this information, and even more happy to have an opportunity to speak directly with developers who may want to contribute additional code to the Achain platform.

All these achievements are just the beginning of where Achain is headed. There are greater things to accomplish on the road ahead. To others, Achain is just another public blockchain, but to myself, it is a blockchain platform that will enable and empower people who want to build something magnificent. It is a planter of decentralized apps and, a cradle of ideas and an incubator of possibilities. And here is what we are planning to accomplish next:

A More Stable Network

We will keep on boosting up our network’s stability and performance so that we can support more dapps on the blockchain and not run into any congestion in the future.

Blockchain for Dapps

We believe that all successful Dapps will eventually leave public blockchains. For Achain, we are looking for solutions that provide Dapps developers with ready-to-use blockchains at the start. Right now, we’re developing the technology and suitable processes to accomplish such a goal.

Cross-chain Communication

This is the biggest item on our agenda and an essential part of building a boundless blockchain world. This technology will bring more utility and possibility to the already powerful blockchain. It breaks the barriers that are now active between different blockchains and creates pathways for information exchange.

The year 2018 is a turning point for Achain. Now we are transitioning from phase one Singularity to phase two Galaxy, where we will build a connected blockchain system that will empower corporations and individuals alike. We feel deeply grateful and fortunate to have such a strong and amazing community who made so many contributions to Achain. With you, the Achain ship will surely sail among the stars.

Thank you, everyone!

Tony Cui

-Founder