Eames Genesis Period Crossed

This month saw our Eames TESTNET create its 21,601st block. The original genesis block was then dropped from the chain before creating the next block. To be valid, the 21,602nd block had to include the ‘rebroadcastable’ transactions from the original ‘genesis’ block. This was a significant step for the network, and demonstrates one of Saito’s unique features.

Pruning data from blockchains to manage size is not a unique concept. What is genuinely novel about Saito is ‘automatic transaction rebroadcasting’. ATR is important for two reasons. The first is that it is baked into Saito’s consensus mechanism, which allows storage and data pruning to be part of the same ‘on-chain economy’ with all other parts of the network. The other is that rebroadcast transactions are competing with fresh transactions for space in the new blocks. This gives a current market price to the action of keeping data on chain.

Together, these two properties give Saito the ability to overcome perhaps the biggest issue facing all blockchains — how to price data storage. And, crucially, this is achieved without closing off or restricting access to the network, and without introducing multiple fees or tokens to handle storage separately.

We are thrilled to have crossed this threshold and to see our Eames network supporting growing transaction volume. The next challenge will come as transaction volume moves past 2,880 blocks per day. This will cause blocks to start “filling up” with larger numbers of user transactions, and the block price to escalate. While our “marathon” instance is nearing 3,000,000 blocks — and nearly 15,000 genesis periods — it operates in ‘laboratory conditions’. It is exciting to see both the principles and the code behind Proof of Transactions working in the wild.