Technical Roadmap

• Past

• September 2018Launch of the RChain Testnet

  RChain Testnet goes live for validator node bonding and unbonding and smart contract deployment testing.

• January 2020RHOC to REV swap

  The RHOC token was a ERC 20 token based on the Ethereum platform. RChain’s native token is the REV token. With the advent of Mainnet, RHOC token holders received an equal number of REV tokens added to their REV wallet.

• February 2020Launch of the RChain Mainnet

  RChain platform goes live with 10 Co-op validator nodes. Transactions are processing.

• March 2020Beginning of Staking (POS)

  50M REV are staked on 10 Co-op validator nodes. Nodes transition from US-based nodes to international-base nodes.

• December 2020Last Finalized State (LFS)

  LFS removes the blocks which lightens the blockchain. Having far fewer blocks to process for update creates greater efficiency which allows new node validators to quickly arrive at the current state.

• December 2020Rholang v1.1

  Created Rholang v1.1 which offers code compression by a factor of 4x for common code structures and optimization on backend with communication and executing events with respect to RSpace.

• March 2021Block merge v1 on Testnet

  rnode 0.11-alpha
  With the implementation of block merge the RChain network now scales horizontally in that as you add validator nodes, the network scales nearly linearly. Scalability is the ability to process a higher volume of transactions as you add either more nodes or more powerful hardware within a node.

• July 2021Hard fork 1

• July 2021Block Merge v2 on Testnet

  Q4 2021Leaderless Block merge (LLBM) Hard Fork 2 (version 1) on Testnet

• Future

  (H1 = 1st half, H2 = 2nd half)

• H1 2022Leaderless Block merge including finalization - Hard Fork 2 on Mainnet

• H1 2022PoS Contract Update to Enable External Validators

  Updating the proof-of-stake consensus smart contract allows external 3rd party validators to join and secure the network.

• H1 2022Hard fork 3 for POS and enable future soft forks

• H1 2022On-Board 3rd Party External Validators

  Create a decentralized network by expanding the number of external 3rd party validators that secure the network.

• H2 2022Rholang v1.1 Operationalization

  Implement Rholang v1.1

• H2 2022Namespaces and Sharding

  A namespace is any collection of names: one name, two names, three names or more. A set is a collection of names. Channels facilitate transactions by acting as pathways. Channels live in namespaces. There are many many more transactions than there are names in a namespace. Implement child shards for interoperability (i.e. Ethereum and Bitcoin).

• 2022Improve Developer Experience

  Will be delivered incrementally throughout the year.

  2022Network Hardening and Bug Fixes

  Will be delivered incrementally throughout the year.

  2022Thread mapping

  Logical threads to physical threads have linear scaling. Add more validators and achieve greater platform capacity.

  2023KPI Dashboard

  The rchain.coop key performance indicator dashboard display metrics such as:

  • - Transaction (txn) volume per second, per minute, per hour, per day
  • - Resource usage by second, minute, hour, day: aggregated and by bandwidth, cpu and storage
  • - Number of validators connected, number of txn/validator/day, by owner
  • - Network decentralization: RChain node cloud diversity and 3rd party validators
  • - Uptime across network as %, uptime by node as %, by owner, issues outstanding, issues yesterday
  • - Number of contracts that fail to complete, number of contracts that fail to complete due to lack of resource
  • - Block creation time

• 2023Basic Behavioral Types

  Type safety with data query functionality.

• 2024Rholang Chip (Bare Metal)

  Substantial performance increase