We are thrilled to announce that our recent Flipstarter campaign has been fully funded, thanks to the unwavering support of our 10 contributors and the incredible Bitcoin Cash community! We genuinely appreciate your belief in our project and the hard work we have been putting into improving Knuth. This funding will primarily support our efforts during Q2 of 2023. In this blog post, we will be sharing our current achievements and outlining our plans for Q2 and the remainder of the year.

Our Achievements

1. Since its inception, Knuth has been an early supporter of Bitcoin Cash, launching alongside the Bitcoin-ABC implementation, and playing a crucial role in helping ABC bring their project to fruition. As some implementations have come and gone over the years, Knuth remains steadfast in our commitment to the BCH ecosystem.

2. Our achievements include the early implementation of CashTokens support and other rule changes that will take effect on May 15, 2023. Despite being a small team with limited resources, we were the second BCH node implementation to accomplish this. We also dedicated significant time to reviewing the CashTokens specification and provided feedback on BCHN's implementation, which was a massive undertaking involving over 200 changed files, nearly 400 commits, and thousands of lines of code changes [1]. Our team's efforts have resulted in a more robust implementation of CashTokens, benefiting the entire community.

3. During the implementation of the May 2023 changes, we faced issues with a third-party component in our build infrastructure, which prompted us to rewrite our build system and CI/CD scripts. As a result, we have developed one of the most sophisticated build systems among all BCH nodes.

4. We are proud to maintain the largest codebase in the BCH ecosystem, with 51 repositories, one node with six APIs/bindings (C++, C, C#, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python), and a unique build system.

5. At one point, Knuth was renowned for its unparalleled transaction processing speed, validating more transactions per second than any other node in the ecosystem. As we strive to continuously improve, our goal is to reclaim our status as the fastest and most efficient node in the market.

Upcoming Plans for Q2 and Beyond

As we move forward in 2023, we have an ambitious roadmap that we are eager to execute. Our plans include the following:

1. Enhance existing APIs, integrate wallet functionality, and add subscription capabilities to events like block reception, transaction reception, and DS-Proof reception for libraries that currently lack support. We will also work on general improvements to the JavaScript and TypeScript libraries, which have been in high demand from the community. As application developers integrate CashTokens, we will add support within the node to streamline their work, and implement better indexing (similar to Fulcrum) within the node.

2. Conduct research on the optimal structure for UTXO Set storage. Please refer to the dedicated section below, "Optimizing UTXO Set Storage," for more details on this exciting research project, which includes the potential use of specialized hardware.

3. Implement FastSync (UTXO Set synchronization). While it is not our primary focus, we aim to have this feature available by the end of the year, if possible.

Optimizing UTXO Set Storage

As we work towards improving Knuth's performance, we acknowledge that the optimization of UTXO Set storage is not only vital to our project, but also holds the potential to revolutionize scalability for the entire Bitcoin Cash ecosystem. Enhanced scalability is a critical factor for achieving global adoption of Bitcoin Cash. We began our in-depth investigation into this matter right after the release of Knuth v0.32.0 in March, and we look forward to sharing our findings soon.

Our examination of the optimal structure for UTXO Set storage delves into multiple techniques, such as:

1. Open addressing, which aims to improve cache locality and create a more cache-friendly structure.

2. Sharding of the UTXO Set, which involves dividing the dataset into smaller, more manageable pieces to enhance performance.

3. Analyzing UTXO Set data to determine "hot" and "cold" data. This allows us to store "hot" data (frequently accessed) on faster storage mediums, while "cold" data (rarely accessed) can reside on slower storage mediums, thus improving overall performance.

In the process of validating blocks and transactions, the most CPU-intensive activity is signature verification. Ideally, this task would benefit greatly from parallelization; however, in practice, this proves to be challenging because signature verification requires access to the UTXO Set, which is a shared resource. To achieve maximum parallelization, we need to enhance how the UTXO Set is stored. This is the primary goal of our research.

Furthermore, we are exploring the potential use of specialized hardware devices to store the UTXO Set. We believe that leveraging such hardware could help us push the limits of UTXO Set optimization even further. We are currently in discussions with various individuals and companies to develop a prototype for testing by the end of the year.

By implementing these techniques and potentially utilizing specialized hardware, we aim to make significant strides in improving Knuth's performance and retaining our position as a leading node implementation in the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem.

Conclusion

We are truly grateful for the support we have received from our contributors and the entire Bitcoin Cash community. Your belief in our vision for Knuth has been vital in helping us reach our goals, starting with the upcoming Q2 2023 developments. We are committed to working tirelessly to bring our plans to fruition and continue our mission to enhance the BCH ecosystem.

Stay tuned for more updates on our progress, and once again, thank you for being a part of our journey!

References

[1] https://gitlab.com/bitcoin-cash-node/bitcoin-cash-node/-/merge_requests/1600