Stoke-on-Trent, UK
Flexathon [ /‘flɛksəθɔn/ ] was a 3-week hackathon project by Dan Hughes to demonstrate innovations the Radix team had been pioneering in areas like consensus algorithms and sharding.
Timeline and Duration
Hughes dedicated his vacation time in November-December 2020 to build out a functioning prototype sharded network exhibiting features like atomic composability. Hughes provided updates and documentation of his progress via Twitter and GitHub.
Goals
The Flexathon project was designed to showcase the capabilities enabled by the Radix team's Cerberus consensus protocol within a sharded environment. Specifically, Hughes set out to build a working implementation that exhibited atomicity, composability and decentralization across shards. The ambitious timeline was aimed to dispel skepticism and doubts about the feasibility of the Radix innovations.
Implementation
The implementation consisted of a mix of old and newly developed components. Code was repurposed from the Radix core, TEMPO/CAST modules developed previously, Hughes' own R&D framework as well as freshly written code to meet the hackathon requirements. The prototype was not meant to resemble future Radix public networks, merely demonstrate Cerberus fundamentals.
Components
Over the three weeks, Hughes built out and demonstrated capabilities including:
- Network connectivity between nodes
- Sending 'atoms' across the network
- Atom pool voting for consensus
- Early versions of features like block production and proof-of-work algorithms
Impact
The Flexathon prototype served as a successful proof-of-concept for the Radix team's innovations and helped validate the potential of the Cerberus protocol.
By showcasing key capabilities like cross-shard atomicity and decentralized composability, Hughes managed to garner interest in Radix's technology vision. However, the prototype itself was not intended to be a direct precursor to later Radix public networks and substantial production hardening would be required. The piecemeal codebase, while helpful for rapid prototyping, did not meet the reliability and security standards demanded of live DLT networks.
Nonetheless, the fundamental atomic composability exhibited during the demo laid the foundations for Radix's subsequent Olympia release leading up to the Alexandria mainnet. Components pioneered during Flexathon found use in further R&D by Hughes and feeds into the roadmap for the Radix protocol moving forward.