Constellation Code Review: Blockchain OS
Share this article
My Constellation code review coincides with the release of their testnet visualizer, which you can see here. The business itself is described as “A blockchain microservice operating system” which checks off all the boxes for any serious contender these days – scalable, fast, reputation-based free transactions, decentralized, mobile, smart contracts, etc etc.
The question, of course, is whether they can live up to the (considerable) hype around the project.
“We propose a fault resistant, horizontally scalable, distributed operating system that can implement full nodes as a mobile client. Therefore, we present a reformulation of cryptographically secure consensus into a modern server-less architecture using an asynchronous ExtendedTrustChain, Proof-of-Meme consensus model, smart contracts as composeable microservices using the JVM and initially implemented as an actor based finite state machine.”
Horizontally scalable…
Proof-of-Meme… dPoS
I do like actor based state machines though.
Let’s go to code, and see if they have a solution for the finality problem.
Scala, makes sense, actor based model and all that. Akka is great at it. Maybe this Constellation code review will turn out well.
What do you know, they do actually use Akka. LevelDB for storage. Straightforward Akka + LevelDB implementation.
Good code structure and commenting, I’ll give them that.
API, standard routes, disabled authentication for now.
Proof of work?
Voting on consensus of the structure. So essentially wait until the DAG looks the same, then vote. So could just use a block.
Constellation Code Review Conclusion:
Decent code, nothing wow, nothing bad. But it’s just another chain. Not seeing the smart contract implementation with the DAG (or the data storage either). The actor model, while architecturally sexy, doesn’t do much.
Not a lot going on here. Just DAG 101. Definitely not horizontally scalable.
Disclaimer: Crypto Briefing code reviews are performed by auditing what is on display in the master branch of the repo’s made available. This was performed as an educational review and any comments in the article are the opinion of the writer. It is normal for code to change rapidly, hence we timestamp our code reviews so that they present a snapshot at a moment in time. Information contained herein should not be used as any comment or advice on the project as a whole.
Constellation Code Review Timestamp: August 2018
(BTW, the image is Orion… horizontally.)
Share this article
