BSV Blockchain is pleased to announce that Overlay Services are now available in a public beta. Overlay Services provides a powerful, scalable, and compliant solution for managing specific transaction types and data access within the BSV blockchain ecosystem. They empower developers.
Overlay Services are integral to the broader BSV ecosystem, which also features Teranode and the wider Mandala upgrade, said Thomas Giacomo (Director of Utilisation at BSV Blockchain).
‘The success of Overlay Services is closely tied to Teranode’s capabilities and is necessary to prevent any problems from occurring once transaction volumes increase. As Teranode will rapidly increase transactions, moving from other less suitable software to an overlay architecture was necessary.
The repo and relevant documentation can be found here.
What are Overlays?
‘In computer networking, the term Overlay usually refers to a virtual network built on top of an existing physical network. It can provide various services such as routing, peer-to-peer networking, or distributed computing,’ said Darren Kellenschwiler (Utilisation Technical Lead at BSV Blockchain)
‘Some BSV blockchain apps are currently built with the expectation that they can read timestamped immutable data from the blockchain. This illusion is achieved by gathering all block data and filtering, indexing, and serving it to applications on demand – for free.’
‘The economic reality is that this cannot be done at one million transactions per second without SPV and the division of labour. As network traffic necessarily grows, filtering and indexing all block data quickly becomes untenable.’
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 and superior quality products When you only pay for what you need, only what you need is manufactured and sold.
Overlays use SPV to ensure their data is valid, allowing applications to share a universal source of truth while limiting the cost of operation to a function of service use rather than total network volume.
The Benefits of Overlay Services
Overlay Services cater to a diverse range of users, including independent developers and companies building applications without their own infrastructure, businesses seeking secure and scalable transaction processing solutions, financial institutions exploring infrastructure for digital currencies like CBDCs, and entrepreneurs interested in creating open protocol overlays for experimental applications.
Notably, Overlay services on the BSV blockchain offer significant benefits and use cases, including:
- Distributed Token management: Overlay Services facilitate efficient transaction propagation and synchronisation between multiple instances to form an Overlay environment. Simple submission and lookup endpoints allow for a broad range of use cases for a robust distributed system.
- Flexibility: They support a shared context across multiple applications and offer the flexibility to create private, public, or ring-fenced overlays tailored to specific use cases.
- Reduced operational cost: Overlay Services provide a much lower cost solution to tracking the state of your businesses’ transactions than running a full node. The service manages transactions you care about without having to process any extraneous ones.
- Seamless integration with BSV infrastructure: These services are fully integrated with BSV’s technical components. During the beta phase that means ARC for TX broadcast and Merkle path acquisition. All applications built with our SDKs can use BEEF transactions when submitting new transactions to Overlay Services.
Request more information about BSV Blockchain’s Overlay services.
Overlay Services – A key part of the Mandala upgrade
BSV Blockchain officially unveiled its new Mandala Upgrade at the BSV DevCon London at the end of May 2024 – with Teranode, Overlay services, and SPV wallets making up a core part of this upgrade.
The Mandala upgrade brings a fresh architectural approach to the BSV network, drawing inspiration from the intricate patterns of traditional Mandalas. This upgrade aims to boost availability, scalability, and operational efficiency by incorporating a Small World Network core encircled by specialised Overlay environments and SPV implementations.
The 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. You can learn more about Teranode, SPV, Overlay services and the Mandala Upgrade here.
