Argonaut Chain

Argonaut Chain is a hybrid PoW and PoS chain build in rust on the substrate framework to solve the blockchain trilemma. Argonaut Chain is incorporating the MBPQS signature scheme for long term quantum security and the blake256 hashing algorithm for more efficient mining. The Prism consensus protocol will be implemented to ensure scalability up to 70,000 tps, Fountain codes for blockchain bootstrap cost and size reduction along with Integrated with IPFS to solve the blockchain bloat problem

Multi Blockchain Post Quantum signatures

We switched to Falcon512 for now

We plan to use the MBPQS algorithm to generate a chain of one time quantum resistant signatures from the public and private key pair in order to give us quantum secure signatures as in the Blockchained Post Quantum Signatures paper written by the R3 blockchain firm. Blake256 is chosen over SHA256 because of its significantlly improved cycles to bytes performance.

Prism for scalability

The prism protocol will be implemented for our consensus protocol enabling us to scale to 70k tps

SeF secure fountain codes for 1000x storage savings

We plan to use the secure fountain code implementation to encode blocks of the Blockchain state into droplet nodes to reduce the bootstrap cost of a full node and reduce the chain size exponentially in order to provide increased security and decentralization, in test of the Bitcoin blockchain over a 90% reduction in the Blockchain size from over 190GB to 191MB

IPFS for offchain multimedia content

IPFS will be used to host websites and other multimedia content offchain in order to reduce the bloat, while storing the releveant Content ID's and hashes into the Blockchain itself. Staking rewards will be distributed to droplet nodes which host IPFS content submitted to the main chain

ToDo List (Ongoing)

Implement orbitDB to have an IPFS based UTXO store

Implement Zcoin style chainlocks to prevent against PoW attacks

Implement ERC721 standard from substrate

Implement custom Ink! smart contract Logic

Implement MBPQS

Implement Prism-Substrate Blocks

Getting Started

This project contains some configuration files to help get started 🛠️

Rust Setup

Setup instructions for working with the Rust programming language can be found at the Substrate Developer Hub. Follow those steps to install rustup and configure the Rust toolchain to default to the latest stable version.

Makefile

This project uses a Makefile to document helpful commands and make it easier to execute them. Get started by running these make targets:

1. make init - Run the init script to configure the Rust toolchain for WebAssembly compilation.
2. make run - Build and launch this project in development mode.

The init script and Makefile both specify the version of the Rust nightly compiler that this project depends on.

Build

The make run command will perform an initial build. Use the following command to build the node without launching it:

make build

Embedded Docs

Once the project has been built, the following command can be used to explore all parameters and subcommands:

./target/release/node-template -h

Run

The make run command will launch a temporary node and its state will be discarded after you terminate the process. After the project has been built, there are other ways to launch the node.

Single-Node Development Chain

This command will start the single-node development chain with persistent state:

./target/release/node-template --dev

Purge the development chain's state:

./target/release/node-template purge-chain --dev

Start the development chain with detailed logging:

RUST_LOG=debug RUST_BACKTRACE=1 ./target/release/node-template -lruntime=debug --dev

Multi-Node Local Testnet

If you want to see the multi-node consensus algorithm in action, refer to our Start a Private Network tutorial.

Template Structure

A Substrate project such as this consists of a number of components that are spread across a few directories.

Node

A blockchain node is an application that allows users to participate in a blockchain network. Substrate-based blockchain nodes expose a number of capabilities:

• Networking: Substrate nodes use the libp2p networking stack to allow the nodes in the network to communicate with one another.
• Consensus: Blockchains must have a way to come to consensus on the state of the network. Substrate makes it possible to supply custom consensus engines and also ships with several consensus mechanisms that have been built on top of Web3 Foundation research.
• RPC Server: A remote procedure call (RPC) server is used to interact with Substrate nodes.

There are several files in the node directory - take special note of the following:

• chain_spec.rs: A chain specification is a source code file that defines a Substrate chain's initial (genesis) state. Chain specifications are useful for development and testing, and critical when architecting the launch of a production chain. Take note of the development_config and testnet_genesis functions, which are used to define the genesis state for the local development chain configuration. These functions identify some well-known accounts and use them to configure the blockchain's initial state.
• service.rs: This file defines the node implementation. Take note of the libraries that this file imports and the names of the functions it invokes. In particular, there are references to consensus-related topics, such as the longest chain rule, the Aura block authoring mechanism and the GRANDPA finality gadget.

After the node has been built, refer to the embedded documentation to learn more about the capabilities and configuration parameters that it exposes:

./target/release/node-template --help

Runtime

In Substrate, the terms "runtime" and "state transition function" are analogous - they refer to the core logic of the blockchain that is responsible for validating blocks and executing the state changes they define. The Substrate project in this repository uses the FRAME framework to construct a blockchain runtime. FRAME allows runtime developers to declare domain-specific logic in modules called "pallets". At the heart of FRAME is a helpful macro language that makes it easy to create pallets and flexibly compose them to create blockchains that can address a variety of needs.

Review the FRAME runtime implementation included in this template and note the following:

• This file configures several pallets to include in the runtime. Each pallet configuration is defined by a code block that begins with impl $PALLET_NAME::Trait for Runtime.
• The pallets are composed into a single runtime by way of the construct_runtime! macro, which is part of the core FRAME Support library.

Pallets

The runtime in this project is constructed using many FRAME pallets that ship with the core Substrate repository and a template pallet that is defined in the pallets directory.

A FRAME pallet is compromised of a number of blockchain primitives:

• Storage: FRAME defines a rich set of powerful storage abstractions that makes it easy to use Substrate's efficient key-value database to manage the evolving state of a blockchain.
• Dispatchables: FRAME pallets define special types of functions that can be invoked (dispatched) from outside of the runtime in order to update its state.
• Events: Substrate uses events to notify users of important changes in the runtime.
• Errors: When a dispatchable fails, it returns an error.
• Trait: The Trait configuration interface is used to define the types and parameters upon which a FRAME pallet depends.

Run in Docker

First, install Docker and Docker Compose.

Then run the following command to start a single node development chain.

./scripts/docker_run.sh

This command will firstly compile your code, and then start a local development network. You can also replace the default command (cargo build --release && ./target/release/node-template --dev --ws-external) by appending your own. A few useful ones are as follow.

# Run Substrate node without re-compiling
./scripts/docker_run.sh ./target/release/node-template --dev --ws-external

# Purge the local dev chain
./scripts/docker_run.sh ./target/release/node-template purge-chain --dev

# Check whether the code is compilable
./scripts/docker_run.sh cargo check