Product Overview

Why are we building CometBFT?

We steward CometBFT towards fulfilling Informal's vision of creating a secure, sustainable, and scalable interchain. Our contribution is towards solving the problem that existing infrastructure for decentralized applications is fragile.

What functionality is currently implemented in CometBFT?

CometBFT is state machine replication engine with Byzantine fault-tolerance guarantees. It is a fork and successor to Tendermint Core, having been used in production for many years (at least as early as 2019) across tens of blockchains.

CometBFT offers following functionality, as of v0.37:

• General-purpose state machine replication engine based on the Tendermint Consensus algorithm (overview)
• Transaction indexing service
• JSON/RPC server for querying and submitting transactions to the replication engine
• Peering layer (with address book and gossip-based communication) for ensuring connectivity & message dissemination among peers
• Mempool for disseminating transactions and staging them for inclusion in the blockchain
• ABCI v1 interface
• Prometheus metrics
• State synchronization and Block synchronization

How is CometBFT implemented?

• Architecture: For a high-level architectural description, see intro to ABCI from the official CometBFT documentation.

  • We use Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) to track major decisions on how CometBFT software is evolving. See here all our ADRs.

• QA: Our testing regimen comprises 3 levels:

  1. Our CI/CD has a host of tests, including e2e tests.

  2. Our periodic (typically nightly) tests include fuzzy testing among others.

  3. We do performance and scalability tests that are manual and more intensive, which we do using a release candidate (RC) before every major release. These tests include networks of up to 200 nodes. The methodology and latest report from these tests, for v0.37.0, can be found here.

• Security: The security practices for CometBFT can be consulted in the official security/policy tab of this Github repository.

Tech debt

• Implementation issues: label:tech-debt; label:bug; label:hygiene
• Architecture issues: label:adr.

Planned work

We maintain a project board capturing all our work. There are three important views:

• Major priorities.
• Release plans
• Quarter by quarter plans, for example, plans for 2023 Q2

Onboarding material

• If you are new to CometBFT, please check the official docs: https://docs.cometbft.com/v0.37/
• If you are an external contributor seeking to develop CometBFT feature or fork, please see:
  • label:good first issue
  • The CometBFT specs
  • The present Wiki
  • Contributor guideline: contributing.md

Contact information

If you are a CometBFT user: Please join the community calls, details here.

Contact info:

• Developer relations: Aliasgar Merchant @andynog.
• Product owner: Adi Seredinschi @adizere.
• For general inquiries with Informal: Please get in touch with us at hello@informal.systems.