VATOM TRANSACTIONS BREAK THE SOUND BARRIER WITH MAJOR PLATFORM SCALABILITY AND SECURITY CHANGES NOW COMPLETE.

The BLOCKv development team, led by CTO Gunther Thiel, has been hard at work over the last six months implementing some major architectural security and scalability improvements to the back-end platform, enabling the promised “brain” and “cycler” functionalities.

Specifically, this has involved migrating core areas of the platform to support fully asynchronous data paths by splitting the core of the BLOCKv platform into more granular components (groups of lambdas instead of a microservices-only architecture). This makes it easier to optimize the choice of technology for each component, “to use the right tool for the right job”, as Gunther puts it.

One key requirement was to implement a high performance asynchronous transactional datapath; the channel for accessing key Vatom properties such as ownership or state.

“We set ourselves a goal of achieving throughput rates that could linearly scale to the millions of transactions per second [that] we believe the platform will need, whilst maintaining the level of integrity that needs to be guaranteed by ACID-like transactions”, Gunther explained. To achieve this, a proprietary transactional data path was built to store and access Vatom related data in a highly scalable fashion.

“Our ability to handle digital object transactions at these volumes is a key differentiator for BLOCKv in an increasingly competitive market, and uniquely qualifies us to handle the kind of volume of objects that industries such as retail, entertainment, and gaming will require over the medium term.”

Through these scalability improvements, the new architecture also allows data to be injected from different sources (like asynchronous messages, gRPCs etc.) and not just API calls. This is essential to support the integrated new services such as “brains” and is a fundamental step towards a more decentralized architecture required for the cycler-framework.

BRAIN CODE BETA NOW OPEN TO ALL

Brains have been one of the most asked about capabilities since our original white paperback in 2017. Brains enable Vatoms to have their own individual or group long-running compute threads that operate independently of the Vatom owner’s client. Brain code further allows Vatoms to self-update properties based on programmed logic, or react to external events. This opens up a range of new capabilities and use cases, from moving Vatoms around on a map, to listening to Twitter and updating a status or unlocking a reward.

For the first time, we publicly launched brain-powered Vatoms last month, with AR butterflies during the Intel-driven Project NGAGE at NRF in New York, and gift-carrying drones at the Blockchain Gamer Connects conference in London. The reaction from users and developers to these demos has been fantastic. These Vatoms used very basic brain logic and the BETA version of the brain framework. Over the past month, we’ve been fixing bugs and making a number of changes and enhancements.

While there’s still more to do with respect to the brain framework for its general release, it is now deployed in production and we’re delighted to be able to extend access to the BETA to a limited number of members of our developer community, who have a proven knowledge of the current platform (i.e. seasoned Vatom developers only please).