EOSIO strategic vision
As a contributor to the growth of the EOSIO™ software, Block.one is committed to working with the community to develop a platform that will strengthen and grow the ecosystem.
The following are foundational pillars through which we aim to make EOSIO the fastest, most scalable, and easiest to use blockchain in the world.
This outline of our vision for EOSIO represents directional areas where Block.one strives to continually explore the advancement of the software in close collaboration with the community over the next few years. Areas of interest in this document should not be treated as products with launch dates but instead should be seen as broad areas where we intend to make continual improvements. As the needs of the community and software platform continue to grow we expect to iterate and prioritize these enhancements to continue making EOSIO the most performant blockchain software in the market.
Scalability: More apps, more users
EOSIO strives to be one of the most performant blockchains in the world with industry-leading transaction speeds and block confirmation times. We will continue to explore vertical and horizontal scaling solutions to enhance performance. Scroll down for an overview and continue reading about Scalability in our latest article on the EOSIO Strategic Vision.
News Article:
Block Production: Vertical Scaling
Build state-of-the-art WASM engines to improve smart contract performance
Not all smart contract business logic is easily parallelizable and so it is important to maximise the single threaded performance of executing the WASM code in smart contracts. EOSIO has been architected to leverage a variety of WASM engines to deliver phenomenal smart contract execution performance. In addition to WABT, WAVM, etc. we are also exploring support for other state of the art engines, and building our own WASM interpreters with associated JIT compilers to further accelerate WASM performance.
Explore improvement of throughput on multicore machines via multithreading feature enhancements
Smart Contracts are primarily single threaded in business logic execution. We are exploring utilizing multiple cores to speed up processing of transactions without requiring developers to rearchitect their smart contract designs. By analyzing the flow of information as the blockchain is constructed and validated, we have identified sections of the critical path for performance that can safely be processed concurrently. Using this analysis we will continually improve the core software’s ability to leverage modern multicore hardware.
Continual profiling of nodeos to identify targeted areas of improvement
Nodeos has many distinct buckets where execution can be improved: WASM execution, database access, intrinsics handling, other native code, etc. Here we aim to continually profile nodeos to identify areas that can provide the biggest benefit for our efforts in trying to optimize execution in each of those areas.
Explore advanced database technologies to improve flexibility and throughput
Nodeos uses a highly performant database today to maximize throughput and provides the ability to rollback deltas on demand. Here we are exploring advanced database technologies which are not only performant and support deltas but also provide the ability to concurrently handle multiple non-conflicting transactions, provide support for arbitrary length primary keys to enable developers more flexible ways of indexing their data, etc.
Explore blockchain technologies that can provide more cost effective access to scarce resources like RAM
Resource costs are a persistent roadblock to mass adoption and growth of EOSIO blockchains. We will continue to explore innovations, such as REX, that lower the effective cost of operating a blockchain application at scale including options for relieving pressure on critical resources by developing attractive alternatives for specialized use cases.
Horizontal Scaling
Explore a variety of Inter-blockchain Communication (IBC) mechanisms (oracle-based, light-client based, etc.) to enable side- and sister-chain based scaling
EOSIO Blockchain was architected to support Inter-blockchain communication to enable practically limitless transaction throughput rates. Here we are exploring several mechanisms to:
- Enable applications to scale by spreading their components to different chains that work together as a whole through IBC
- Enable applications to scale by replicating across many chains that can each handle a subset of user requests
- Enable two or more applications on different chains to intercommunicate