The team at BSV Blockchain are working alongside several partners, including AWS and Aerospike, to help bring the Mandala upgrade to life, says Jake Jones (Head of Infrastructure at BSV Blockchain).
Speaking on the sidelines of the London Blockchain Conference, Jones said that one of the key value propositions offered by Bitcoin is micropayments – payments of less than a cent. But to make this viable there needs to be a lot of them, he said.
‘So we need a system that can scale to accommodate a lot of micropayments. And to do that, we need a system that’s able to specialise and move assets around to different places depending on what kind of resources are available,’ he said. ‘So we started that with Teranode, where we took the node requirements laid out in section 5 of the Bitcoin white paper, what SV node currently does, minus the additional non-node functions SV node currently performs such as storing and serving transaction data, and built it using a services architecture. And now we’re applying that same approach to the rest of the network.’
Jones noted that this upgrade of the BSV Blockchain network is in line with the original Bitcoin white paper.’Right now, with SVnode, nodes are doing more than section five of the whitepaper. So we want to take all of those things that aren’t in the white paper, and we want to pull them out and add another layer around Teranode that can do those things.’
The Mandala upgrade
Officially unveiled at BSV DevCon 2024, 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 gets stacked and becomes more complex, the patterns become more complex and additional components need to interact with the centre of the network: SPV Wallets are the base P2P component at the edges of the network, overlay services form the more complex bridge that is a coalescence of P2P transactions from SPV Wallets, and the network of nodes and specialised nodes that will run Teranode form the complex centre of the mandala network.
While a team of people at the BSV Blockchain are working on the Mandala upgrade, Jones noted that several partners are helping to bring it to life. AWS and Aerospike are helping out with the Teranode project as the completion of tests at 1 Million transactions per second with 6 nodes, has been allowed by the high quality of the services they provided’
Why is it called the Mandala upgrade?
Jones explained that the upgrade has been named ‘Mandala’ because of its shape. ‘If you think of what a mandala is, it’s almost like a fractal shape, but it’s in dedicated environments. So we have the centre of the network, which is the node network, and that’s the small world network.
That’s one design. And it’s a fractal that folds in on itself. And so that same concept applies to the other components as well. But what’s cool about it is it’s the same underlying shape. And that underlying shape is peer-to-peer communication.
‘So every component is doing peer-to-peer communication in its way. Overlays and SPV wallets are doing peer-to-peer communication similarly. But then you have Teranode doing things in a much faster way using subtrees and blocks in addition to transactions. But each of those components has its unique pattern because the frequency and complexity of their communications are different even though they’re using the same fundamental P2P communication model.’
BSV partnerships
One million transactions per second and the high throughput capabilities of Teranode are made possible through AWS and Aerospike services. In addition, one-click AWS deployment for SPV is possible. Additional opportunities will be explored through the creation of a dedicated environment with overlay services.
