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HYCON Code Review: SPECTRE Consensus Algorithm

Aug. 24, 2018

HYCON Code Review Infinity Platform DAG SPECTRE Consensus

HYCON is building the Infinity Platform, simple enough for anyone to build their own customized blockchain, guess I’ll be out of a job.

A lot of focus here on accountability and transparency, security, things that DAGs are ostensibly good at.

“HYCON, which stands for Hyperconnected Coin, is the digital asset built on top of a faster and more scalable blockchain developed by the Infinity Project team. Using a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) structure, it has the capability to publish several blocks simultaneously with the ability to resolve conflicting transactions and reject double-spends through the SPECTRE consensus algorithm.”

I’ve been interested in exploring DAG solutions lately, they promise horizontal scalability, but often neglect to mention finality.

Whitepaper is pretty thin, let’s head over to the code.

Typescript. Interesting choice. Apparently Javascript is the choice for DAG developers.

Cryptonight hashing Proof-of-work.

Protobuff.

Main has standard command line arguments;

./server is our entry point.

Ledger support.

Reminder to go look at their private key generation.

BIP key generation 101.

Secp256k1

Wallets are AES password encrypted on the local drive.

Good code structure and layout, easy to follow.

Jumping back to ./server

WorldState, Consensus, RabbitNetwork, MinerServer, RestManager. Let’s hunt them down.

Longest Chain rule. Bit disappointing.

Levelup.

HYCON Code Review Conclusion:

Just another DAG. Code is fine, but not great or interesting. Good design from an architectural point of view, but it won’t achieve horizontal scalability since it still has the finality bottleneck. The greater the network, the longer the propagation ,and thus the more generation rounds required to reach finality.

All the 101 components are here though, so it is a DAG, it just doesn’t do much other than that.

You can chat about HYCON in our Telegram group.

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.

HYCON Code Review Timestamp: July 31st 2018

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