RChain Platform Architecture

Authors:Ed Eykholt, Lucius Meredith, Joseph Denman Date:2017-07-22 Organization:RChain Cooperative Copyright:This document is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License

Abstract

The RChain Platform Architecture description provides a high-level blueprint of the RChain decentralized, economically sustainable public compute infrastructure. While the RChain design is inspired by that of earlier blockchains, it also realizes decades of research across the fields of concurrent and distributed computation, mathematics, and programming language design. The platform includes a modular, end-to-end design that commits to correct-by-construction software and industrial extensibility.

Intended audience: This document is written for software developers and innovators who are interested in decentralized systems.

Contents:

• Motivation
• Approach
• Introduction
• Comparison of Blockchains
• Architecture Overview
  • Concurrency vs. Parallelism
• Node and Blockchain Semantics
• Contract Design
  • Contract Overview
  • The Formalism: Rho-Calculus
  • Significance
  • RhoLang - A Concurrent Language
• Namespace Logic
  • Namespace Definitions
  • Composable Namespaces - Resource Addressing
• Execution Model
  • Overview
  • Execution Environment
  • Compilation
• Storage and Query
  • Overview
  • Data Semantics
  • P2P Node Communications
• Casper Consensus Algorithm
• Applications
  • Contract Development & Deployment
• References