ggawryal
commented
5 months ago Hi @hhamud,
The code in AlephBFT repo is a standalone consensus implementation for general purposes, and here we have only its integration with substrate. This integration is done in https://github.com/Cardinal-Cryptography/aleph-node/tree/r-13.3/finality-aleph.
However, our priority was always adding new features to Aleph Zero blockchain, which may make it harder to reuse our substrate integration of our consensus for other blockchains. That being said, not everything used in finality-aleph is absolutely necessary to run a custom blockchain, as well as we might rely too much in some parts of the code on some specific substrate client parts (like Aura).
Nevertheless, the integration includes, inter alia:
- Implementing data availability for AlephBFT,
- Handling session switches and possible AlephBFT version upgrades,
- Implementing own block sync protocol, more tailored to AlephBFT (currently we're finishing this) - we found that the one implemented in substrate is not really consensus agnostic, as it assumes that the consensus mechanism is somewhat based on the longest chain rule, and AlephBFT inherently is not. This caused us some problems in the past.
You can also see how the blockchain's components, and particularly finality-aleph is initialized there: https://github.com/Cardinal-Cryptography/aleph-node/blob/r-13.3/bin/node/src/service.rs.
hhamud
Marcin-Radecki
I have read your original alephBFT API documentation but I noticed that you also have a subtrate compatible version here. I wanted to know how to integrate that component instead into a subtrate compatible node.
If this is the wrong place to ask such a question then I will delete and ask somewhere else.
Thanks in advance.