2 posts tagged with "Testnet"

TLDR​

Earth, the first phase of MusashiNet, the Leios public testnet, asked whether the prototype holds in the wild. Forty-one days later, the answer is yes.

• Six times mainnet's ceiling. MusashiNet peaked at 26.8 TxkB/s with Leios active, against the 4.51 TxkB/s Cardano mainnet can reach with Praos alone. That's 6x mainnet's current maximum throughput.
• The whole protocol ran end to end, in public. More than 127,000 blocks, 30,000 endorser blocks announced, nearly 8,000 certificates on chain, 63 pools registered, and 10 releases in 6 weeks.
• Five incidents, zero design failures. A memory leak, two forks, frozen syncs, a one-byte serialization disagreement and a network-wide halt, all related to bugs, found and fixed in the open. The design proved to be correct.
• The red team is already inside. Piranha attacks the network with our published threat model in hand; so far Leios degrades in proportion to attacker stake, and the safety of the Praos layer remains untouched.
• Water phase just started. A fresh chain for parameter exploration, a redesigned mempool and real BLS keys, with the rewards program live, including retroactive rewards for pools that forged and voted in Earth.

Last time, we talked about why Cardano needs Leios and introduced MusashiNet, the Dojo where the protocol trains: five phases from Musashi's Book of Five Rings (Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, Void) and two swords, the short sword of Praos blocks and the long sword of endorser blocks. Earth, the first phase, has now closed. This is its story.

What Earth gave us​

The Earth phase asked one question: does the prototype hold in the wild, at real latencies, on machines we neither control nor can see? Holding meant running the whole protocol end-to-end: Praos blocks produced, endorser blocks announced, the stake voting on them, certificates landing on chain. The numbers that follow are that checklist, ticked.

Forty-one days. More than 127,000 blocks, 30,000 endorser blocks announced, nearly 8,000 certificates carried on chain. Sixty-three pools registered over the phase, up from the three we started with, forty producing blocks in a single epoch at the peak. Twelve releases in eight weeks, an unbroken weekly cadence that absorbed two same-week hotfixes without missing the next release.

A young testnet has no traffic of its own, so we brought our own. The centrifuge, our synthetic load generator, was tuned to push slightly more transactions than Praos could clear on its own, and the protocol's settings stayed at cautious first values. It ran one hour on, one hour off. Twelve hours a day, every day, the network lived in the conditions Leios was built for.

That was enough for a first test of the design at a global scale. MusashiNet peaked at 26.8 TxkB/s with Leios active, against the 4.51 TxkB/s Cardano mainnet can reach with Praos alone at today's parameters. Six times today's ceiling, with the dials barely turned. In the final days of the phase, when things were more stable, Leios was carrying 54% of everything that reached the chain.

Compared with the traffic the mainnet actually carried over the same period, the Earth phase moved 18x the transaction count and 3.3x the bytes.

Why Leios?​

Block space is the resource a blockchain offers its users, and its supply is fixed: so many bytes per block, so many smart contract execution units per block, so many blocks per unit of time. Demand keeps its own schedule. Most of the time it runs stable and well below the limit; then a launch, an airdrop, or a market move compresses it into a spike. It is the textbook problem of seasonal demand against fixed capacity, with one twist: on a chain the season can arrive in minutes. Applications already plan around the limit. The Midnight Glacier Drop spread its redemption over months rather than risk a poor user experience due to a congested network. Each redemption required a Cardano Mainnet transaction.

The squeeze sharpens as Cardano's activity consolidates in decentralized finance (DeFi), where timeliness is the difference between the trade you wanted and the trade you got: prices move, windows close, liquidations fire. Some chains meet a burst by selling the front of the queue: pay more, land sooner. Cardano has no such lane. Differential pricing is under active research, and today every transaction waits in the same line, regardless of who sent it. So the line itself has to move faster. Every chain has a throughput ceiling; an app can only promise its users what the chain can deliver, and in DeFi the promise has a deadline.

Ouroboros Leios is Cardano's answer to that ceiling. It runs in a dormant state as an overlay on Ouroboros Praos, the protocol Cardano uses today. When transactions arrive faster than Praos alone can clear, Leios steps in and, in the gaps between Praos blocks, builds a second kind of block: the endorser block, which carries far more transactions and validates them in parallel. Once enough of the stake has validated them, a later Praos block carries a small certificate for the endorser block, and the whole batch lands on the chain at once. Security stays where it always was, with Praos. Capacity arrives when demand asks for it.

Today we are launching MusashiNet, the public testnet that takes the Leios prototype all the way to production-grade code on Cardano mainnet.

It takes its name from Miyamoto Musashi, a samurai who fought close to sixty duels and retired undefeated. Every fencing school of his era taught one sword style; Musashi used two, a long one and a short one, which let him attack and defend at once and adapt to conditions a single blade could not cover. A chain running Leios fights the same way: the short sword is the Praos block, the long sword is the endorser block.

MusashiNet is the Dojo, the training hall where Leios is perfected. Musashi's Book of Five Rings also gave the testnet its five phases, each built on the one before. Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, Void.

Join the Dojo​

Earth begins today. The first phase has a single goal: to validate the Linear Leios design of CIP-164 in the wild — the whole protocol running end to end, Praos blocks produced, endorser blocks announced, the stake voting on them, certificates landing on chain, at real latencies and across real distance.

If you run a stake pool, Leios needs you sparring, not spectating. The sharpest questions left can only be answered from hardware we do not own, in places we did not choose. Spin up a node on MusashiNet, register your pool, and put the protocol through your conditions before it reaches mainnet. Come train with us.