After more than two years of core development on the Factom Protocol, I will be moving on. One of the goals I set for myself when I started my journey into Factom was to make it easier for people to follow along the same path. …

At the time of writing, the database size of a Factom Protocol MainNet node is around 28GiB and takes several days to sync. …

The Factom Protocol is a Proof of Authority blockchain, operated by nearly two dozen entities across the globe. Immutability is ensured by the unlikeliness of over a dozen independent companies to agree on a malicious attack, combined with the unlikeliness of such cooperation staying secret. However, the Factom Protocol goes…

One of the major roadblocks to increasing TPS inside the Factom Protocol is the architecture of factomd, particularly the single-threaded approach to message processing. To provide a short recap, the Factom Protocol consensus happens inside the “Process List” (PL) — one per block. …

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion around the topic of ANO and server management. That was a stumbling block for me when I started tinkering with Factomd since the code responsible for on-boarding ANOs happens to spread across different repos. This blog aims to shine some light on…

One of the hurdles that we frequently run into when developing is the question: “did this actually improve the product?” This can lead to some very interesting discussions about where the actual bottleneck is. One of the ways is to have a specific test harness that will perform the same…

Currently, onboarding and deboarding of authority nodes is done by whoever has access to the network skeleton key. That key is hardcoded in the factomd codebase. Whoever has access to the private key essentially controls the authority set. There are a number of drawbacks to this approach: The private key…

At the time of writing, adding a new asset to PegNet is possible but it is a laborious manual process: Find at least two APIs that provide free and reliable* data for the market price Create a polling adapter that is able to read the API endpoint and transform the…

One of PegNet’s selling points is decentralization — officially there is nobody in charge of PegNet. It works as long as the people using it agrees to play by the same rules, which at the moment is done by everyone using the same software: pegnetd. …