Terraform Labs R&D

Two years of research and development on blockchain systems, as a Rustacean in a distributed team. The work sat at the layer where consensus meets the network: how fast a global set of nodes can agree, and how fast a new node can join.

Highlights

• Consensus algorithm development and libp2p networking.
• A high-performance in-memory transport layer for libp2p, so that thousands of simulated nodes could run in one process for testing.
• A 15,000-node consensus test across the globe, reaching finality in under two seconds.
• Partial IPLD state synchronisation, bringing a fresh node up to date in under fifteen seconds instead of replaying history.
• Game-theoretic protocol design, and atomic swaps; the shared library from that work is open at boymaas/atomic-bridge.