Photo by Farzad Nazifi on Unsplash

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the first TopiaCoin Engineer’s Dev Blog. I’m Cody Sandwith, one of Topia Technology’s engineers, and I’ve been heavily involved with the TopiaCoin/SDFS project. The aim of this blog is to give you all a behind-the-scenes look at our design and development process and progress. I (or perhaps one of my colleagues) will try to post one of these Dev Blogs every Wednesday and Friday.

Aside from some backend TopiaCoin.io work, my colleague John Haager and I have been working on the design for the SDFS SDK. He and I have been able to leverage our experience designing and writing SDKs for Topia’s other products (such as Secrata) which has allowed the process to proceed smoothly. Since SDFS is heavily influenced by Secrata, the APIs and SDK will take a similar (if expanded) form. Here’s the diagram he drew:

John draws very nice diagrams

One of the most interesting technical hurdles we have had to overcome with this project is figuring out how to manage multiple blockchains on a single node. Blockchain managers like Bitcoin Core or Ethereum Wallet were not designed to have multiple instances running, so we needed a backing solution that would give us the flexibility that would allow us to achieve our goals. As of now, we’re planning to use Multichain. Early proof-of-concept code leads us to believe that this will work well for us. However, even with Multichain, running a blockchain consumes some amount of system resources and two ports — those things aren’t unlimited! We do not want to be constrained to how many blockchains a user can have, but we need to run each chain if we want it to work…

So after much deliberation and hand wringing, John and I designed a subsystem, affectionately called Chainmail, designed to manage a pool of running blockchains. It starts and stops the blockchains intelligently and basically tries to keep everything up-to-date. As a side bonus, it should greatly reduce the system requirements of SDFS. It’s also got a really cool name (you’ll never guess who named it 😉).

That’s it for this blog. Join us next time for more updates and, if we’re lucky, another diagram from John.

About the Author:

Cody Sandwith is a University of Washington graduate, and has been working for Topia Technology since 2011 on Secrata, a highly-encrypted File Sync and Share Platform.