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Weekly Summary – June 3, 2025

· 2 min read
William Wolff
William Wolff
Architect

This week, the Leios team focused on infrastructure improvements, formal methods advancement, and large-scale network simulation. The team successfully resolved outstanding CI issues, enhanced the formal specification with Full-Short Leios support, and began simulating a realistic 10,000-node pseudo-mainnet topology.

Infrastructure improvements​

  • Fixed outstanding CI bugs #368 and #379, enabling all CI checks to pass.

Formal methods advancement​

  • Added Full-Short Leios as a special case of Short Leios to the formal specification
  • Implemented trace verification capabilities for Full-Short Leios.

Pseudo-mainnet topology simulation​

  • Designed and initiated comprehensive simulations from 1 to 300 TPS using the new pseudo-mainnet topology
  • Created a realistic 10,000-node network with:
    • 2,657 block producers and 7,343 relay nodes
    • Realistic stake distribution and geographic distribution
    • Two relays per block producer with realistic latencies
    • 298,756 total connections with 6-hop network diameter
  • Observed significant performance challenges within the large-scale simulation:
    • Rust simulation: six minutes of network time in 10 hours at one TPS
    • Performance degradation at higher TPS rates (one minute network time in 10 hours at 300 TPS)
    • Haskell simulation requires optimization for practical large-network analysis.

Rust simulation enhancements​

  • Implemented random sampling of transactions from the Leios memory pool to ensure different IBs contain different transactions when possible
  • Added simulation support for the Leios variant, where IBs contain transaction references rather than full transaction bodies
  • Enhanced transaction handling for high-traffic scenarios.

Analysis of conflicts and incentives​

  • Completed comprehensive analysis of transaction conflicts, ledger design, and fee incentives
  • Key findings on conflict management:
    • Honest duplicates and conflicts are unavoidable with local sortition
    • Memory pool rules can minimize conflicts through prompt transaction removal
    • Collateral requirements for failed transactions conflict with Cardano's guarantees
  • Identified block producer compensation strategies for handling conflicting transactions
  • Proposed EB-level optimization through bitmap-based transaction validation to reduce persistent storage of duplicates and conflicts.