If you missed it, Horizen is designing Sidechains and a Sidechain SDK to allow developers and enterprises to quickly and affordably spin up their own blockchains. The Horizen team now has multiple sidechain nodes up and running and is actively testing the synchronization between nodes! This brings us one step closer to our alpha release!

The Importance of Node Synchronization

A node by itself is just an isolated point. To provide maintenance of a blockchain, you must have a set of nodes connected together, and nodes need to have a valid and stable mechanism of synchronization in order for a blockchain to work correctly. If you don’t ensure the validity and stability of the history, your chain splits and becomes incomplete.

The same methodology applies for mainchain to sidechain synchronization, as will be the case with our Cross Chain Transfer Protocol.

The Benefits of Synchronization

The main benefit of the synchronization between mainchain and sidechain is that it allows the forward transfer of coins from the mainchain to the sidechain and withdraw requests of coins from sidechain to mainchain.

The synchronization between the two chains, and the fact that the mainchain doesn’t have to directly follow what happens inside each sidechain, increases scalability and maintains fast transaction speeds when companies and developers begin building on top of the Horizen network.

In particular, our approach is to have all of the different sidechain networks follow the mainchain history. These sidechain networks follow the mainchain history, each sidechain network will only extract information related to that particular sidechain, and ignore everything else, like all the other sidechain information. Additionally, the mainchain will not be required to follow any sidechain, thus allowing scalability. Thanks to this model, synchronization between the two chains is established.

Sidechain Test Framework

Another unique component we are integrating is the sidechain test framework. This is similar to the test framework we use already in our mainchain. The framework will allow testing multiple nodes synchronized with each other, at the same time. Currently, we are only able to test one sidechain node at a time. The goal is to create a small but functional network and to do that we are working on the integration of the sidechain test framework.

Learn more about Horizen Sidechains

This blog is part of our Horizen Sidechains Series. To learn more about our sidechains, please read:

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