Liveness is a critical component of the Interchain Stack, influencing operational reliability, scalability, and performance. Ensuring that all nodes can communicate consistently reduces downtime and improves overall system functionality. However, decentralized blockchain development presents significant challenges in providing liveness guarantees at the protocol level. Interchain Foundation revealed this trailblazing news through its official media account, X.
1/ Liveness is an important concept in the Interchain Stack, affecting operational reliability, scalability, and performance.
Yet, the inherent challenges of decentralized blockchain development make it challenging to provide liveness guarantees at the protocol level today. pic.twitter.com/Q5WHxlMVPt
— Interchain Foundation (@interchain_io) October 11, 2024
Safety as a Priority Over Liveness
The Interchain Stack, which includes components such as Cosmos SDK, CometBFT, CosmWasm, and IBC, prioritizes safety over liveness as a core design principle. This approach helps maintain the integrity and functionality of the network despite common misconceptions about liveness.
Developers need to recognize that while liveness is important, prioritizing safety ensures that the Interchain Stack remains a secure and reliable foundation for innovative blockchain applications. This prioritization is essential to protect billions of dollars in digital assets.
Decentralization necessitates the collaboration of multiple parties to perform computations and reach consensus, introducing various unknown factors that affect performance. These challenges make it irresponsible to promise liveness guarantees, as the Interchain Stack has never claimed to provide them.
Developers should avoid assumptions about consistent block throughput or timely events and design their applications with these uncertainties in mind. Implementing timeout mechanisms and optimizing resource usage will help maintain functionality during variable network conditions.
Interchain Foundation’s Strategies for Enhancing Liveness
Steward teams investigate strategies to mitigate liveness issues as the Interchain ecosystem evolves. CometBFT, the consensus engine for the Interchain, has already introduced measures to improve liveness. For instance, reducing the default block size from 21 MB to 4 MB can help manage the impact of high transaction volumes. Additionally, adjustments to timeout parameters and consistent node configurations contribute to improved reliability.
The CometBFT team also focuses on implementing Quality of Service (QoS) measures to prioritize transaction handling. These improvements aim to prevent network overload during periods of high demand. The Dynamic Optimal Graph gossip protocol enhances transaction dissemination efficiency, significantly reducing bandwidth usage and improving performance.