AION: Update

Last few months I have been very busy with bringing AION to the next level, the level on which it can actually be used and becomes a product.

So far the progress is steady but still away from fully finished. As always with new projects is that during the development you come across some issues that require you to rethink parts of your solution. (That this happened was anticipated!)

For AION this was rethinking the importance of timewarps. As discussed in a previous article is that timewarps are a little bit more complicated than initially anticipated. This in itself was not a problem but timewarps always have been the main focus of making AION efficient. This is still true but a more higher-level concept for managing paths in AION was needed.

Lifelines, hooks and subgraphs

The problem with only relying on timewarps is that multiple can exist at the same time and they could stop at any given time as well. In order to keep a path to your data, it is essential to be able to switch timewarps. This concept of constantly watching timewarps and finding paths between them is called a lifeline. I found the name quite fitting because if this line is broken your AION node is dead (but can be recovered) simply because there is no longer a connection to the ‘live’ consensus (current local snapshot). Hence Lif/veline.