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Opinionated Framework for Building Hyper-Scalable Blockchains on Avalanche

The freedom to create your own Virtual Machine (VM), or blockchain runtime, is one of the most exciting and powerful aspects of building on Avalanche, however, it is difficult and time-intensive to do from scratch. Forking existing Avalanche VMs makes it easier to get started, like spacesvm or subnet-evm, but is time-consuming and complex to ensure correctness as changes occur upstream (in repos which often weren't meant to be used as a library).

The hypersdk is the first (of many) frameworks dedicated to making it faster, safer, and easier to launch your own optimized blockchain on an Avalanche Subnet. By hiding much of the complexity of building your own blockchain runtime behind Avalanche-optimized data structures and algorithms, the hypersdk enables builders to focus their attention on the aspects of their runtime that make their project unique (and override the defaults only if needed). For example, a DEX-based project should focus on implementing a novel trading system and not on transaction serialization, assuming that is already done efficiently for them.

This opinionated design methodology means that most runtimes built on the hypersdk, called a hypervm, only need to implement 500-1000 lines of their own code to add custom interaction patterns (and don't need to copy-pasta code from upstream that they need to keep up-to-date). However, if you do want to provide your own mechanism, you can always override anything you are using upstream if you can compose something better suited for your application. That same DEX-based project may wish to implement custom block building logic that prioritizes the inclusions of trades of certain partners or that interact with certain order books.

Last but certainly not least, the usage of these Avalanche-optimized data structures and algorithms means that your hyperchain can process thousands of transactions per second without needing to hire a team of engineers to optimize it or understanding anything about how it works under the hood...but you can certainly achieve higher throughput if you do ;).

• hypersdk: framework for building high-performance blockchains on Avalanche
• hypervm: Avalanche Virtual Machine built using the hypersdk
• hyperchain: hypervm deployed on the Avalanche Network

hypersdk is considered ALPHA software and is not safe to use in production. The framework is under active development and may change significantly over the coming months as its modules are optimized and audited.

All hypersdk state is stored using x/merkledb, a path-based merkelized radix tree implementation provided by avalanchego. This high-performance data structure minimizes the on-disk footprint of any hypervm out-of-the-box by deleting any data that is no longer part of the current state (without performing any costly reference counting).

The use of this type of data structure in the blockchain context was pioneered by the go-ethereum team in an effort to minimize the on-disk footprint of the EVM. We wanted to give a Huge shoutout to that team for all the work they put into researching this approach.

Instead of requiring nodes to execute all previous transactions when joining any hyperchain (which may not be possible if there is very high throughput on a Subnet), the hypersdk just syncs the most recent state from the network. To avoid falling behind the network while syncing this state, the hypersdk acts as an Avalanche Light Client and performs consensus on newly processed blocks without verifying them (updating its state sync target whenever a new block is accepted).

The hypersdk relies on x/sync, a bandwidth-aware dynamic sync implementation provided by avalanchego, to sync to the tip of any hyperchain.

Instead of employing goleveldb, the hypersdk uses CockroachDB's pebble database for on-disk storage. This database is inspired by LevelDB/RocksDB but offers a few improvements.

Unlike other Avalanche VMs, which store data inside avalanchego's root database, hypervms store different types of data (state, blocks, metadata, etc.) under a set of distinct paths in avalanchego's provided chainData directory. This structure enables anyone running a hypervm to employ multiple logical disk drives to increase a hyperchain's throughput (which may otherwise be capped by a single disk's IO).

The hypersdk is primarily about an obsession with hyper-speed and hyper-scalability (and making it easy for developers to achieve both by wrapping their work in opinionated and performant abstractions). Developers don't care how easy it is to launch or maintain their own blockchain if it can't process thousands of transactions per second with low time-to-finality. For this reason, most development time on the hypersdk thus far has been dedicated to making block verification and state management as fast and efficient as possible, which both play a large role in making this happen.

hypersdk transactions must specify the keys they will touch in state (read or write) during execution and authentication so that all relevant data can be pre-fetched before block execution starts, which ensures all data accessed during verification of a block is done so in memory). Notably, the keys specified here are not keys in a merkle trie (which may be quite volatile) but are instead the actual keys used to access data by the storage engine (like your address, which is much less volatile and not as cumbersome of a UX barrier).

This restriction also enables transactions to be processed in parallel as distinct, ordered transaction sets can be trivially formed by looking at the overlap of keys that transactions will touch.

Parallel transaction execution was originally included in hypersdk but removed because the overhead of the naïve mechanism used to group transactions into execution sets prior to execution was slower than just executing transactions serially with state pre-fetching. Rewriting this mechanism has been moved to the Future Work section and we expect to re-enable this functionality soon.

The Auth interface (detailed below) exposes a function called AsyncVerify that the hypersdk may call concurrently (may invoke on other transactions in the same block) at any time prior/during block execution. Most hypervms perform signature verification in this function and save any state lookups for the full Auth.Verify (which has access to state, unlike AsyncVerify). The generic support for performing certain stateless activities during execution can greatly reduce the e2e verification time of a block when running on powerful hardware.

The hypersdk makes no assumptions about how Actions (the primitive for interactions with any hyperchain, as explained below) are verified. Rather, hypervms provide the hypersdk with a registry of supported Auth modules that can be used to validate each type of transaction. These Auth modules can perform simple things like signature verification or complex tasks like executing a WASM blob.

hypersdk transactions don't use nonces to protect against replay attack like many other account-based blockchains. This means users can submit transactions concurrently from a single account without worrying about ordering them properly or getting stuck on a transaction that was dropped by the mempool.

Additionally, hypersdk transactions contain a time past which they can no longer be included inside of a hypersdk block. This makes it straightforward to take advantage of temporary situations on a hyperchain (if you only wanted your transaction to be valid for a few seconds) and removes the need to broadcast replacement transactions (if the fee changes or you want to cancel a transaction).

On the performance side of things, a lack of transaction nonces makes the mempool more performant (as we no longer need to maintain multiple transactions for a single account and ensure they are ordered) and makes the network layer more efficient (we can gossip any valid transaction to any node instead of just the transactions for each account that can be executed at the moment).

hypersdk provides support for Avalanche Warp Messaging (AWM) out-of-the-box. AWM enables any Avalanche Subnet to send arbitrary messages to any another Avalanche Subnet in just a few seconds (or less) without relying on a trusted relayer or bridge (just the validators of the Subnet sending the message). You can learn more about AWM and how it works here.

AWM is a primitive provided by the Avalanche Network used to verify that a particular BLS Multi-Signatures is valid and signed by some % of the stake weight of a particular Avalanche Subnet (typically the Subnet where the message originated). Specifying when an Avalanche Custom VM produces a Warp Message for signing, defining the format of Warp Messages sent between Subnets, implementing some mechanism to gather individual signatures from validators (to aggregate into a BLS Multi-Signature) over this user-defined message, articulating how an imported Warp Message from another Subnet is handled on a destination (if the destination chooses to even accept the message), and enabling retries in the case that a message is dropped or the BLS Multi-Signature expires are just a few of the items left to the implementer.

The hypersdk handles all of the above items for you except for defining when you should emit a Warp Message to send to another Subnet (i.e. what an export looks like on-chain), what this Warp Message should look like (i.e. what do you want to send to another Subnet), and what you should do if you recieve a Warp Message (i.e. mint assets if you receive an import).

Every object that can appear on-chain (i.e. Actions and/or Auth) and every chain parameter (i.e. Unit Price) is scoped by block timestamp. This makes it possible to easily modify existing rules (like how much people pay for certain types of transactions) or even disable certain types of Actions altogether.

Launching your own blockchain is the first step of a long journey of continuous evolution. Making it straightforward and explicit to activate/deactivate any feature or config is critical to making this evolution safely.

Unlike the Virtual Machines live on the Avalanche Primary Network (which gossip transactions uniformly to all validators), the hypersdk only gossips transactions to the next few preferred block proposers (using Snowman++'s lookahead logic). This change greatly reduces the amount of unnecessary transaction gossip (which we define as gossiping a transaction to a node that will not produce a block during a transaction's validity period) for any hyperchain out-of-the-box.

If you prefer to employ a different gossiping mechanism (that may be more aligned with the Actions you define in your hypervm), you can always override the default gossip technique with your own. For example, you may wish to not have any node-to-node gossip and just require validators to propose blocks only with the transactions they've received over RPC.

The hypersdk allows for any Action to return a result from execution (which can be any arbitrary bytes), the amount of fee units it consumed, and whether or not it was successful (if unsuccessful, all state changes are rolled back). This support is typically required by anyone using the hypersdk to implement a smart contract-based runtime that allows for cost-effective conditional execution (exiting early if a condition does not hold can be much cheaper than the full execution of the transaction).

The outcome of execution is not stored/indexed by the hypersdk. Unlike most other blockchains/blockchain frameworks, which provide an optional "archival mode" for historical access, the hypersdk only stores what is necessary to validate the next valid block and to help new nodes sync to the current state. Rather, the hypersdk invokes the hypervm with all execution results whenever a block is accepted for it to perform arbitrary operations (as required by a developer's use case). In this callback, a hypervm could store results in a SQL database or write to a Kafka stream.

When initializing a hypervm, the developer explicitly specifies which storage backends to use for each object type (state vs blocks vs metadata). As noted above, this defaults to CockroachDB's pebble but can be swapped with experimental storage backends and/or traditional cloud infrastructure. For example, a hypervm developer may wish to manage state objects (for the Path-Based Merkelized Radix Tree) on-disk but use S3 to store blocks and PostgreSQL to store transaction metadata.

It is functionally impossible to improve the performance of any runtime without detailed metrics and comprehensive tracing. For this reason, the hypersdk provides both to any hypervm out-of-the-box. These metrics and traces are aggregated by avalanchego and can be accessed using the /ext/metrics endpoint. Additionally, all logs in the hypersdk use the standard avalanchego logger and are stored alongside all other runtime logs. The unification of all of these functions with avalanchego means existing avalanchego monitoring tools work out of the box on your hypervm.

We created the tokenvm to showcase how to use the hypersdk in an application most readers are already familiar with, token minting and token trading. The tokenvm lets anyone create any asset, mint more of their asset, modify the metadata of their asset (if they reveal some info), and burn their asset. Additionally, there is an embedded on-chain exchange that allows anyone to create orders and fill (partial) orders of anyone else. To make this example easy to play with, the tokenvm also bundles a powerful CLI tool and serves RPC requests for trades out of an in-memory order book it maintains by syncing blocks. If you are interested in the intersection of exchanges and blockchains, it is definitely worth a read (the logic for filling orders is < 100 lines of code!).

To ensure the hypersdk remains reliable as we optimize and evolve the codebase, we also run E2E tests in the tokenvm on each PR to the hypersdk core modules.

The indexvm is much more complex than the tokenvm (more elaborate mechanisms and a new use case you may not be familiar with). It was built during the design of the hypersdk to test out the limits of the abstractions for building complex on-chain mechanisms. We recommend taking a look at this hypervm once you already have familiarity with the hypersdk to gain an even deeper understanding of how you can build a complex runtime on top of the hypersdk.

The indexvm is dedicated to increasing the usefulness of the world's content-addressable data (like IPFS) by enabling anyone to "index it" by providing useful annotations (i.e. ratings, abuse reports, etc.) on it. Think up/down vote on any static file on the decentralized web.

The transparent data feed generated by interactions on the indexvm can then be used by any third-party (or yourself) to build an AI/recommender system to curate things people might find interesting, based on their previous interactions/annotations.

Less technical plz? Think TikTok/StumbleUpon over arbitrary IPFS data (like NFTs) but all your previous likes (across all services you've ever used) can be used to generate the next content recommendation for you.

The fastest way to expedite the transition to a decentralized web is to make it more fun and more useful than the existing web. The indexvm hopes to play a small part in this movement by making it easier for anyone to generate world-class recommendations for anyone on the internet, even if you've never interacted with them before.

We'll use both of these hypervms to explain how to use the hypersdk below.

To use the hypersdk, you must import it into your own hypervm and implement the required interfaces. Below, we'll cover some of the ones that your hypervm must implement.

Note: hypersdk requires a minimum Go version of 1.20

type Controller interface {
	Initialize(
		inner *VM, // hypersdk VM
		snowCtx *snow.Context,
		gatherer ametrics.MultiGatherer,
		genesisBytes []byte,
		upgradeBytes []byte,
		configBytes []byte,
	) (
		config Config,
		genesis Genesis,
		builder builder.Builder,
		gossiper gossiper.Gossiper,
		vmDB database.Database,
		stateDB database.Database,
		handler Handlers,
		actionRegistry chain.ActionRegistry,
		authRegistry chain.AuthRegistry,
		err error,
	)

	Rules(t int64) chain.Rules
	StateManager() chain.StateManager

	Accepted(ctx context.Context, blk *chain.StatelessBlock) error
	Rejected(ctx context.Context, blk *chain.StatelessBlock) error

	Shutdown(context.Context) error
}

The Controller is the entry point of any hypervm. It initializes the data structures utilized by the hypersdk and handles both Accepted and Rejected block callbacks. Most hypervms use the default Builder, Gossiper, Handlers, and Database packages so this is typically a lot of boilerplate code.

You can view what this looks like in the tokenvm by clicking this link.

ActionRegistry *codec.TypeParser[Action, *warp.Message, bool]
AuthRegistry   *codec.TypeParser[Auth, *warp.Message, bool]

The ActionRegistry and AuthRegistry are inform the hypersdk how to marshal/unmarshal bytes on-the-wire. If the Controller did not provide these, the hypersdk would not know how to extract anything from the bytes it was provded by the Avalanche Consensus Engine.

In the future, we will provide an option to automatically marshal/unmarshal objects if an ActionRegistry and/or AuthRegistry is not provided using a default codec.

type Genesis interface {
	GetHRP() string
	Load(context.Context, atrace.Tracer, chain.Database) error
}

Genesis is typically the list of initial balances that accounts have at the start of the network and a list of default configurations that exist at the start of the network (fee price, enabled txs, etc.). The serialized genesis of any hyperchain is persisted on the P-Chain for anyone to see when the network is created.

You can view what this looks like in the tokenvm by clicking this link.

type Action interface {
	MaxUnits(Rules) uint64
	ValidRange(Rules) (start int64, end int64)

	StateKeys(auth Auth, txID ids.ID) [][]byte
	Execute(
		ctx context.Context,
		r Rules,
		db Database,
		timestamp int64,
		auth Auth,
		txID ids.ID,
		warpVerified bool,
	) (result *Result, err error)

	Marshal(p *codec.Packer)
}

Actions are the heart of any hypervm. They define how users interact with the blockchain runtime. Specifically, they are "user-defined" element of any hypersdk transaction that is processed by all participants of any hyperchain.

You can view what a simple transfer Action looks like here and what a more complex "fill order" Action looks like here.

type Result struct {
	Success     bool
	Units       uint64
	Output      []byte
	WarpMessage *warp.UnsignedMessage
}

Actions emit a Result at the end of their execution. This Result indicates if the execution was a Success (if not, all effects are rolled back), how many Units were used (failed execution may not use all units an Action requested), an Output (arbitrary bytes specific to the hypervm), and optionally a WarpMessage (which Subnet Validators will sign).

type Auth interface {
	MaxUnits(Rules) uint64
	ValidRange(Rules) (start int64, end int64)

	StateKeys() [][]byte
	AsyncVerify(msg []byte) error
	Verify(ctx context.Context, r Rules, db Database, action Action) (units uint64, err error)

	Payer() []byte
	CanDeduct(ctx context.Context, db Database, amount uint64) error
	Deduct(ctx context.Context, db Database, amount uint64) error
	Refund(ctx context.Context, db Database, amount uint64) error

	Marshal(p *codec.Packer)
}

Auth shares many similarities with Action (recall that authentication is abstract and defined by the hypervm) but adds the notion of some abstract "payer" that must pay fees for the operations that occur in an Action. Any fees that are not consumed can be returned to said "payer" if specified in the corresponding Action that was authenticated.

The Auth mechanism is arguably the most powerful core module of the hypersdk because it lets the builder create arbitrary authentication rules that align with their goals. The indexvm, for example, allows users to rotate their keys and to enable others to perform specific actions on their behalf. It also lets accounts natively pay for the fees of other accounts. These features are particularly useful for server-based accounts that want to implement a periodic key rotation scheme without losing the history of their rating activity on-chain (which determines their reputation).

You can view what direct (simple account signature) Auth looks like here and what delegate (acting on behalf of another account) Auth looks like here. The indexvm provides an "authorize" Action that an account owner can call to perform any ACL modifications.

type Rules interface {
	GetMaxBlockTxs() int
	GetMaxBlockUnits() uint64 // should ensure can't get above block max size

	GetValidityWindow() int64
	GetBaseUnits() uint64

	GetMinUnitPrice() uint64
	GetUnitPriceChangeDenominator() uint64
	GetWindowTargetUnits() uint64

	GetMinBlockCost() uint64
	GetBlockCostChangeDenominator() uint64
	GetWindowTargetBlocks() uint64

	GetWarpConfig(sourceChainID ids.ID) (bool, uint64, uint64)
	GetWarpBaseFee() uint64
	GetWarpFeePerSigner() uint64

	FetchCustom(string) (any, bool)
}

Rules govern block validity and are requested from the Controller prior to executing any block. The hypersdk performs this request so that the Controller can modify any Rules on-the-fly. Many common rules are provided directly in the interface but there is also an option to provide custom rules that can be accessed during Auth or Action execution.

You can view what this looks like in the indexvm by clicking here. In the case of the indexvm, the custom rule support is used to set the cost for adding anything to state (which is a very hypervm-specific value).

To add AWM support to a hypervm, an implementer first specifies whether a particular Action/Auth item expects a *warp.Message when registering them with their corresponding registry (false if no expected and true if so):

ActionRegistry.Register(&actions.Transfer{}, actions.UnmarshalTransfer, false)
ActionRegistry.Register(&actions.ImportAsset{}, actions.UnmarshalImportAsset, true)

You can view what this looks like in the tokenvm by clicking here. The hypersdk uses this boolean to enforce the existence/non-existence of a *warp.Message on the chain.Transaction that wraps the Action (marking a block as invalid if there is something unexpected).

Actions can use the provided *warp.Message in their registered unmarshaler (in this case, the provided *warp.Message is parsed into a format specified by the tokenvm):

func UnmarshalImportAsset(p *codec.Packer, wm *warp.Message) (chain.Action, error) {
	var (
		imp ImportAsset
		err error
	)
	imp.Fill = p.UnpackBool()
	if err := p.Err(); err != nil {
		return nil, err
	}
	imp.warpMessage = wm
	imp.warpTransfer, err = UnmarshalWarpTransfer(imp.warpMessage.Payload)
	if err != nil {
		return nil, err
	}
	// Ensure we can fill the swap if it exists
	if imp.Fill && imp.warpTransfer.SwapIn == 0 {
		return nil, ErrNoSwapToFill
	}
	return &imp, nil
}

This WarpTransfer object looks like:

type WarpTransfer struct {
	To    crypto.PublicKey `json:"to"`
	Asset ids.ID           `json:"asset"`
	Value uint64           `json:"value"`

	// Return is set to true when a warp message is sending funds back to the
	// chain where they were created.
	Return bool `json:"return"`

	// Reward is the amount of [Asset] to send the [Actor] that submits this
	// transaction.
	Reward uint64 `json:"reward"`

	// SwapIn is the amount of [Asset] we are willing to swap for [AssetOut].
	SwapIn uint64 `json:"swapIn"`
	// AssetOut is the asset we are seeking to get for [SwapIn].
	AssetOut ids.ID `json:"assetOut"`
	// SwapOut is the amount of [AssetOut] we are seeking.
	SwapOut uint64 `json:"swapOut"`
	// SwapExpiry is the unix timestamp at which the swap becomes invalid (and
	// the message can be processed without a swap.
	SwapExpiry int64 `json:"swapExpiry"`

	// TxID is the transaction that created this message. This is used to ensure
	// there is WarpID uniqueness.
	TxID ids.ID `json:"txID"`
}

You can view what the import Action associated with the above examples looks like here

As mentioned above, it is up to the hypervm to implement a message format that it can understand (so that it can parse inbound AWM messages). In the future, we expect that there will be common message definitions that will be compatible with most hypervms (and maintained in the hypersdk).

If you want to take the lead on any of these items, please start a discussion or reach out on the Avalanche Discord.

• Use pre-specified state keys to process transactions in parallel (txs with no overlap can be processed at the same time, create conflict sets on-the-fly instead of before execution)
• Add a WASM runtime module to allow developers to embed smart contract functionality in their hypervms
• Overhaul streaming RPC (properly heartbeat and close connections)
• Implement concurrent state pre-fetching in chain/processor (blocked on x/merkledb locking improvements)
• Create an embedded explorer and wallet that is compatible with any hypervm
• Add support for Fixed-Fee Accounts (pay set unit price no matter what)
• Add a state processing loop that always prioritizes access by Verify and Build over handing Gossip and Submit requests (can cause starvation of consensus process under load)
• Pre-fetch state during block production loop (currently 30-40% slower than normal execution)
• Use a memory arena (pre-allocated memory) to avoid needing to dynamically allocate memory during block and transaction parsing
• Add a module that does Data Availability sampling on top of the networking interface exposed by AvalancheGo (only store hashes in blocks but leave VM to fetch pieces as needed on its own)
• Implement support for S3 and PostgreSQL storage backends
• Provide optional auto-serialization/deserialization of Actions and Auth if only certain types are used in their definition
• Add a module that could be used to track the location of various pieces of data across a network (see consistent hasher) of hypervm participants (even better if this is made abstract to any implementer such that they can just register and request data from it and it is automatically handled by the network layer). This module should make it possible for an operator to use a single backend (like S3) to power storage fro multiple hosts.
• Only set export CGO_CFLAGS="-O -D__BLST_PORTABLE__" when running on MacOS/Windows (will make Linux much more performant)