Tangram: Cypher Overview

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Tangram

4 min readApr 4, 2021

As we get closer to the Open Beta release of Cypher after its many iterations and upgrades, this article will serve as a high-level overview of where we are today, while providing some status updates.

Here are some of the key accomplishments and insights.

March Review — Technical Improvements

Refactoring, new features and test scripts. Cypher now contains many other significant fixes, changes and improvements including the following:

Fixes to VDF (verifiable delay function) where in some instances it would get lost and hang, ultimately preventing the creation and sending some of the needed blocks to some nodes;
Fixes to running distribution incorrect data which implies the number of tokens in circulation for staking;
Fixes to services related to Cypher’s ledger.

For full commit details check out:

cypher-network/cypher

Cypher is an early, unaudited, and unrefined release of Tangram. Cypher will serve as a proving ground, allowing teams…

github.com

While there has been work done on Blockmania (Tangram’s implementation of byzantine consensus protocol), there has also been a number of improvements made to Cypher, with more being planned. These improvements are primarily in the area of finding issues and bugs efficiently in a distributed system, including testing and monitoring. So far these include:

Creating a test setup that allows the team to fire up nodes and connect to each other on the latest release;
Addition of event logger to the node. This is not meant as textual logging for humans, but for a script/test application to interpret;
amongst others, however, we are investing time in this as other issues and improvements are made on the protocol.

Work has begun on these, with further details on the progress below.

Blockmania

Prior to the last commit, there were some issues occurring when a transaction reached a node; sometimes it was not disseminated properly to multiple nodes. These issues have been identified and fixed as of the 28th of March. However as laid out above, we need to better isolate our testing across cypcore and more importantly around the consensus, for example, the different states and messages broadcasted (commit, preprepare, prepare etc…)

While this work is ongoing, a new release will be built for testing purposes. For this there remain two pieces to be implemented:

Tangram’s fork choice rule;
The logic of deciding n node has won n round for validating therefore is rewarded n reward.

These are currently being implemented, and of course, we will all keep an eye out, wait and see:

Whitepaper

As we wait for the last two important implementations in Cypher, we’re working on a draft Whitepaper with all the new features and fixes that have been made since the initial Whitepaper release.

While this has been an ongoing issue, we have identified several potential Technical Writers who may have the skills to put Tangram Whitepaper v2.0 into a succinct readable format. We are currently awaiting responses from these individuals.

The challenge and learning curve for this may however disincentivize potential candidates, therefore we are working on an action plan to create a new Whitepaper draft utilising PP’s knowledge of the codebase. This would then form a foundation for a Technical Writer to build on.

Mapping out what’s next and needed for a mainnet launch

The final release of Cypher to Closed Beta testing
Announce the initial release of Cypher to Open Beta testing. This will be open to the community and includes ease of installation, running and usage of Cypher and Bamboo
Security Audit
Finalise Whitepaper v2.0
Initial must-have developer documentation of the core elements of Tangram

Thinking of contributing to Cypher?

You can find Cypher’s codebase here: https://github.com/cypher-network/

Connect with any of the core team members and/or community managers, OR simply create an issue/pull request!