Today we’re excited to launch WeaveVM Alphanet V2, a major network upgrade that brings new features and improved scalability compared to Alphanet V1. We’ve implemented the first ever Arweave-EVM gaseconomics and achieved a 5.6x increase in data throughput. In this post, we’ll go over the improvements and how they were implemented.
The state of Alphanet V1 after V2
With the launch of Alphanet V2, we’ll be sunsetting the Alphanet V1 network. This decision comes as Alphanet V1 has successfully achieved its technical goals during the testing phase, and we’re now entering a new era with Alphanet V2.
In just three months, Alphanet V1 reached impressive milestones: over 67,000 users, more than 2 million transactions, and 2.6 million Arweave archival transactions using the WeaveVM-ExEx data protocol.
It’s worth noting that while the Alphanet V1 state will reset with the Alphanet V2 launch, the V1 state will remain permanently accessible and retrievable from Arweave using the WeaveVM-ExEx data protocol. This underscores the rationale behind our approach being the first EVM sovereign rollup on Arweave.
WeaveVM Alphanet V2 is here
Alphanet V2 represents months of hard work finally coming to fruition. This release brings us a significant step closer to mainnet technical functionality. Below, we’ll outline the most important updates and changes in this release.
Same RPCs and endpoints, but a fresh new state
Alphanet V2 will have a fresh state (memory, accounts, deployments, history, etc.) but will maintain the same V1 endpoints throughout the migration – any integrations that worked with the V1 RPC will carry over to V2 with no changes required.
5.6x Higher Data Throughput, And Faster Finality
In V1, Alphanet had a 2s block time and ran at 150 mgas/s (9.375 MBps data throughput). With the V2 release, we’ve made several improvements:
- Block time has decreased from 2s to 1s
- Gas per non-zero byte has been reduced from 16 to 8
- Block gas limit has been increased from 300M to 500M
As a result, Alphanet V2 will run at 500 mgas/s (~62 MBps data throughput) and achieve faster finality. These changes bring us a step closer to our 1+ ggas/s target.
Data-Centric Changes at the Smart Contracts Level
As a data-centric EVM rollup, we have doubled the contract size defined in EIP-170 (24576 bytes in EIP-170), lifting the max limit for dApp developers to deploy larger singleton smart contracts for complex on-chain activities.
Introducing WeaveVM Gaseconomics: The First Arweave-EVM Gaseconomics
Gaseconomics of an EVM chain often require modification when that EVM network is a rollup and needs to settle data on a L1. Until now, most EVM rollups have settled data on Ethereum, using widely adopted gaseconomics practices. However, as the first EVM rollup to use Arweave for main and only data settlement, we had to build new gaseconomics that use the Arweave network for data settlement and take into account the price of Arweave storage.
This change makes WeaveVM fully independent from Arweave’s 100kb free transaction subsidy that’s being provided for now by organizations within the Arweave ecosystem. It allows the network to operate at any data limit and puts proper economics in place where users pay for the data that their actions on WeaveVM generate on Arweave. Check out the code implementation here and here.
In simple terms, this iteration of the gaseconomics design in Alphanet V2 defines a new EVM base fee, increasing it from 21,000 to 500,000 gas. This gas change resulted from careful calculations factoring in Arweave’s base winston fee, which remains constant for any data ranging from 1 byte to 256 KB. This new minimum base fee of 500,000 gas also introduces a new constant called LPGP (Lowest Possible Gas Price), set at 640,000,000 wei/gas (0.64 gwei/gas), indicating the new minimum gas price on Alphanet V2.
With this new gaseconomics design, and because WeaveVM Alphanet’s transaction size limit is lower than 256 KB (128 KB on WeaveVM), any transaction on Alphanet V2 will have enough gas paid by the transaction sender to cover data settlement fees on Arweave.
ICYMI: WeaveVM Alphanet V1 General Progress
While developing Alphanet V2, we’ve been working in parallel on several novel EVM integrations, public goods and dev tools. These include the first bidirectional data pipeline between Arweave and EVM, several Reth Execution Extensions, and onboarding 4 EVM L2s to use WeaveVM Archiver. We’ve shared more news and updates on blog.wvm.dev.
The WeaveVM team is dedicated to building the first sovereign EVM rollup on the world’s only permanent storage chain, Arweave. Stay tuned for more upcoming updates and releases as we get closer and closer to mainnet.