General

What Is Arcology?

Arcology is an Ethereum L2 rollup that targets some deeply rooted problems of existing blockchain system designs. It is a perfect choice, probably the only one for resource-intensive blockchain applications.

What Is Arcology good for?

Arcology is good for all blockchain-native applications that weren’t believed possible due to poor scalability or high cost.

How Does Parallelization Improve Scalability?

Arcology is a parallel blockchain. Whatever can be parallelized has been parallelized. Not on the transaction execution, but also Merkle Trie related operations and even the architecture itself.

What Does Parallel Execution Mean in General?

Generally, parallel execution means processing multiple transactions at the same time instead of one after another. Modern computers usually have multiple cores and processors, making it possible to improve scalability by handling many tasks simultaneously, thus enhancing the system's speed and efficiency.

How Does Arcology Process Transaction in Parallel?

Arcology wraps EVM into execution units called EUs. An EU is an abstraction of any virtual machine that can process transactions and generate state transitions. All the transactions are executed in full parallel by multiple EVM instances.

EVM Doesn't Have Concurrency Support, So Did You Reimplement EVM to Do It?

No, unlike some EVM parallelization proposals, Arcology didn't choose to reimplement the EVM to support concurrency. Instead, it extended the original implementation, enabling multiple independent EVM instances to work simultaneously. Simply put, the parallelization happens at the intra-VM level, not the inter-VM level.

What Are the Advantages of This "Intra-VM" Approach Over Others?

This approach makes no breaking changes to the original EVM, allowing Arcology to easily maintain equivalence as the EVM evolves. Additionally, it enables Arcology to scale across a cluster of interconnected machines, leveraging multiple cores and processors for even greater scalability and efficiency.

What Is A Node Cluster?

The node cluster is deployment mode in which a group of interconnected machines working together as a single node on Arcology network.

How Is a Node Cluster Different From a Node?

Conventionally a node is just a machine with a piece of client software installed (Geth for instance). Arcology allows multiple interconnected machines (physical / virtual) to share the workload of a single node.

What Are the Major Benefits?

There is always an upper limit on how many processors, memory, and storage space a single machine can have. A cluster-enabled design can effectively remove this constraint, allowing for more computational power and data storage to deliver higher throughput.

How Fast Can Arcology Run?

There is no theoretical limit on how fast Arcology can run. The throughput is more of a matter of resources. Arcology takes full advantage of all the resources available.

For Ethereum, the biggest bottleneck is the StateDB. What does Arcology do about it?

Yes, for Ethereum, the single biggest performance bottleneck is the StateDB. Arcology addresses the StateDB bottleneck by making the Merkle Patricia Trie both parallelized and asynchronous.