It has been almost 2 months since we released The Lovelace network upgrade - Alphanet v0.3.0. Today, we are thrilled to announce that the Alphanet v0.4.0 (Kasparov Upgrade) is live in production. Kasparov brings huge improvements to precompiles, new Arweave-related JSON-RPC methods, an integration with AO’s file system, and support for tagged transactions.
Alphanet V0.3.0 Recap
The Lovelace upgrade at block 2817713 brought massive network growth: over 5.5M transactions processed, $1B TDVA secured, and integration with key networks - Metis, RSS3, Dymension, Avalanche, Humanode, and Ethereum blobs via blobscan.
Chart-topping stats
WeaveVM’s data protocol on Arweave (weavevm-exex) has led transaction volume among data protocols (ANS-104 dataitems).
dApp traction
On the application layer side, Alphanet v0.3.0 has seen the birth of apps such as onchain.rs and relic.bot – the first data-intensive dApps on WeaveVM.
These applications were built on top on WeaveVM’d Bundled transaction data protocol (0xbabe bundles), which was also introduced in the Lovelace network phase, marking the first ever bundled EVM transactions specification, and pushing WeaveVM’s TPS capacity to 50k TPS!
Read more about Bundler here.
To catch up on more Alphabet v0.3.0 related news and traction, check out the January Update.
Alphanet v0.4.0: The Kasparov upgrade
Let’s dive quickly into the new updates and changes in the Kasparov upgrade! The Alphanet v0.4.0 went live on block 8027013 – and the upgrade name, Kasparov, is inspired by the Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov chess match on Febrary 10th 1996.
The main focus in this network upgrade was: performance, bug fixes, data interoperability, and more!
1: Major Precompiles fixes: I/O Performance
Precompiles on WeaveVM are the tools that make the WeaveVM data programmable, therefore continuous precompile fixes are necessary. The v0.4.0 introduces the switch from tokio to non-tokio calls, more specifically, using ureq.
The fixes have also addressed precompiles proper and safe error handling, response streaming, and timeouts – the foundation for safer data programmability on WeaveVM.
PR #122-128-129
2: Actor Model Arweave ExEx
On the Reth Execution Extensions level (ExEx), similar to the precompiles, we have made performance enhancement to the data bridges from WeaveVM to Arweave: Arweave ExEx, the ExEx responsible to send data from WeaveVM to Arweave (weavevm-exex data protocol).
PR #130
3- The eth_getArweaveStorageProof JSON-RPC method
WeaveVM pushes block data to Arweave, and we have developed several tools to retrieve that data once settled. However, we still had a missing piece – storage proof retrieval through the JSON-RPC. For that reason, in 0.4.0 we introduced the eth_getArweaveStorageProof JSON-RPC method in PR #131.
Try it out today:
curl -X POST https://testnet-rpc.wvm.dev \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
--data '{
"jsonrpc":"2.0",
"method":"eth_getArweaveStorageProof",
"params":["8038800"],
"id":1
}'4: The eth_getWvmTransactionByTag JSON-RPC method
Another much needed JSON-RPC method was the ability to be able to retrieve a WeaveVM transaction by its tags. Tagged transactions are a feature introduced in Alphanet v0.3.0 – check out the code integration here.
Introduced in PR #132
5: WeaveDrive ExEx Integration
In order to achieve data integrity across the compute protocols on Arweave, we have created an ExEx that integrates AO’s AOP-5, which is responsible to attest WeaveVM data on AO, making it accessible natively by the AO processes. This enables cross-communication between AO and WeaveVM through the subledger, Arweave!
Check out the WeaveDrive ExEx here
6: Miscellaneous
The Alphanet v0.4.0 upgrade has addressed other core-focused improvements such as versioned structs for WeaveVM Block structs - which maintains data protocols backward compatibility and integrity - dependencies fixes and versions bumping, and compute VM deployment on Latitude.sh baremetal (hyperparallel performance, oooooo!)
A note to developers
Your existing WeaveVM builds will work seamlessly with the Alphanet upgrade - we’ve only added bug fixes and performance improvements, no breaking changes. We encourage you to push WeaveVM to its limits and stress test the network!
Looking ahead to Alphanet v0.5.0
As WeaveVM progresses toward mainnet, our next major upgrade aims to significantly boost network capabilities. We’re targeting 1 gigagas/s, ~120 MB/s data throughput, and 100k TPS. The update will also address v0.4.0 bug iterations and implement refined gaseconomics.