Today I am happy to announce a preview release of Steem powered by our new Shared Memory database architecture. We previously introduced this as Graphene 2.0, but have chosen to rebrand it as a separate and fully independent Database library named ChainBase.
This release should be feature complete and could in theory be a fully functional replacement for all Steem nodes. We are releasing it as a preview to get some extra testing before migrating over into the official repository and making it a highly recommend update.
The new ChainBase repository is a dependency free implementation of the core database technology that powers this latest preview release of Steem. The idea is that any blockchain (or non-blockchain project) that needs a fast, efficient, version controlled, nested-transactional database can benefit from this library. In particular, there is no dependency on fc or steem. There is also no blockchain logic in this library which makes it politically neutral for any blockchain to adopt.
The benefits of this release include:
- Faster Startup / Shutdown Times
- Less frequent database corruption (less replay)
- Less frequent blockchain corruption (less resync)
- One step closer to multiple processes sharing same memory (more web clients per computer)
While most Steem users will not see any benefit from this release, those of us who provide the infrastructure will greatly appreciate these updates. Now that this migration is complete, we can begin to build new features that will benefit everyone.
Blockchain Features on the Short Term (this year) roadmap include:
Allowing the community to vote on Blockchain Paramaters such as:
a. Reducing the Inflation Rate
b. Reducing the Vesting Withdraw Period
c. Reducing Vesting rewards
d. Reducing Witness pay
f. Other properties that are currently hardcodedCuration Guilds - allow people to pool and share voting power
We are not advocating to change any blockchain parameters, but we respect that these things should be subject to community approval.