Blockchain Protocol Experiments

This workspace contains extensive research and experimental implementations for highly optimized, high-throughput network protocols specifically designed for blockchain execution environments (e.g., Ethereum execution nodes, provers, sidecars).

Overview

The primary focus of this research is identifying and implementing the lowest-latency, highest-throughput transport mechanism for transferring massive payloads—specifically Execution Witnesses, which can frequently exceed 100MB and approach 500MB per block.

By eliminating the overhead of standard HTTP and RPC frameworks on local or high-speed trusted networks, these experiments aim to push gigabytes per second across loopback and LAN interfaces with minimal CPU context switching and zero memory bloat.

Sub-Projects

1. witness-tcp

A complete specification and implementation of the Lightweight Execution Witness TCP Wire Protocol.

• What it is: A bare-bones, connection-oriented raw TCP protocol using a simple 9-byte header framing ([1 Byte Type] [8 Byte Length]).
• Why it exists: Designed to outperform HTTP/2, gRPC, QUIC, and UDS by fully utilizing the OS kernel's native TCP loopback optimizations and zero-copy buffers.
• Results: Reaches > 6.5 GB/s throughput with parsing latencies of < 2µs on Apple Silicon (M3 Max).
• Features: Includes an EIP-style formal specification (spec.md), a highly optimized Rust native chunked streaming server/client, and an equivalent TypeScript client.ts implementation operating via the Node.js net module.

2. server-experiment & witness-transport

The initial benchmarking suites that drove the creation of witness-tcp.

• These modules contain comprehensive test harnesses that pit raw TCP, HTTP/2 (hyper), gRPC (tonic), QUIC (quinn), and Unix Domain Sockets (IPC) against each other varying payload sizes from 8MB up to 500MB without allocating more than a single 1MB memory footprint.

Usage

To run the benchmarking suite for the final TCP Wire Protocol implementation:

cd witness-tcp
./run_benchmarks.sh

To run the alternative TypeScript client against the Rust server:

cd witness-tcp
npm install
npx tsc
node client.js