BSV Blockchain officially unveiled its new Mandala Upgrade at the BSV DevCon London at the end of May 2024.
In the penultimate presentation of the day Thomas Giacomo (Director of Utilisation at BSV Blockchain), Darren Kellenschwiler (Utilisation Technical Lead at BSV Blockchain) and Jake Jones (Head of Infrastructure at BSV Blockchain) provided an update about the upcoming Mandala upgrade, developer tools and open-source roadmap.
What is the Mandala upgrade?
Giacomo explained that the Mandala upgrade broadly consists of three key components:
- Teranode: Teranode stands at the centre of the new upgrade and is responsible for keeping a global record while dealing with standardised transactions and high throughput capacity.
- Overlay services: Overlays allow the distribution of that demand across many services as well as the empowerment of individuals having ownership and agency over their own identity and personal information. This distribution of agency and demand with the ability to granularly purchase only what’s needed works together to minimise waste and provide superior service. When you only pay for what you need, only what you need is manufactured and sold.
- SPV Wallet: The open-source reference implementation SPV Wallet clarifies the state-of-the-art technical architecture of BSV wallets through its open-source, non-custodial framework, enabling seamless transaction verification and management at significantly reduced costs. Designed for exchanges, wallet providers and businesses running BSV applications, it offers a reference implementation of a simplified payment verification only (SPV, section 8 of the Bitcoin white paper) wallet for enhanced efficiency and security.
Unlocking the BSV blockchain
Giacomo added that the Mandala upgrade will fully unlock the BSV blockchain allowing it to dynamically scale at an exponential rate so it’s ready to meet the growing demand for trusted data.
A Mandala network is a network that forms recursively from an unbounded number of smaller networks of the same form as itself. It uses a base topology that can be stacked on top of itself allowing the network to dynamically grow and contract based on need or resource availability.
As this P2P topology becomes more complex, the pattern becomes more complex and that forms another layer of the network.
The role of Overlay services
‘Overlay services are specialised services designed to manage specific types of transactions or business functions, such as digital currencies, archival services, or financial instruments,’ said Jake Jones.
‘These dedicated environments operate independently but connect to the core network for essential functions like submitting transactions, retrieving Merkle paths, and performing double-spend checks. This setup enhances performance without overburdening the core network.’
Teranode as a core node network
Siggi Oskarsson (Teranode Director) presented Teranode as part of the Mandala upgrade at Devcon where he discussed its unrivalled scalability. ‘Teranode only focuses on the core on the core functionalities of a BSV node. It is therefore able to achieve scalability and performance over one million transactions per second,’ he said.
A Small World Network is a network topology optimised for the rapid dissemination of information, minimising the number of hops needed to synchronise the entire network. This is crucial for efficiently propagating transactions from the network’s edge to the core mining nodes.
In the context of the BSV blockchain, this significantly reduces the risk of double-spend attacks and enhances network resilience.
SPV wallets will act as the base layer
Kellenschwiler described SPV Wallets as the foundational P2P layer at the network’s edges, with overlay services forming a more intricate core that amalgamates P2P transactions from these wallets. The core network of nodes and specialised nodes, which will run Teranode, constitutes the complex centre of the mandala network.
Within the Mandala network, SPV Wallets boost functionality by using simple integrity checks to verify transaction authenticity and integrity without needing the full blockchain data. This capability enables transactions to move peer-to-peer (P2P) efficiently while ensuring security and data integrity.
