Preston Evans

Just a regular guy from Idaho. I like Hiking, Camping, Fishing, and writing about distributed systems.

Nearly Optimal State Merklization

There's a meme going around Twitter that Solana is fast because it doesn't merklize its state. I think I'm having a Eureka moment in performant blockchain design. Three main points: 1. Do not Merklize chain state. This removes a huuuuge overhead in both execution and disk usage! 2. Use an SQL DB instead of a raw KV store. Instead of the chain implementing a query server,… — Larry Engineer (@larry0x) December 27, 2023 ... And to some extent, this is true. In the Sovereign SDK, for example,

From the Archives: Pentagonal Exchange

From the archives: the original proposal for Pentagonal Exchange. Now thoroughly outdated, but maybe still interesting.

Ava is no ETH-killer

If you're going to build a Dapp, don't do it on Avalanche.