Previously: flightofthefox had just closed a fork-safety gap by locking shard consensus into the HotStuff-2 safe-vote rule, and was driving a full epoch transition through the simulator with the new topology schedule.
A wide-ranging week. With the basic building blocks settled, flightofthefox turned to the messy middle: what happens to a cross-shard transaction whose shards are reshaped out from under it? The answer — a fence built on settled waves, a new way for shards to join via snapshot sync, and the first splits and merges actually running end-to-end in the simulator — is the meat of this week's digest.
161
+87% vs last wk
commits
+16k −3.8k
+136% vs last wk
lines changed
Commits / day
peak 42/day · 7/7 days active
Momentum
Lines changed / week
last 8 weeks
What flightofthefox built
A fence for stranded transactions
When a shard splits or merges, cross-shard transactions can be left hanging. flightofthefox built a settled-waves fence: the surviving side reconstructs what the disappeared shard had committed, and aborts what can't carry over. Nothing is silently lost.
→ see “The Will” on hyperscale.rsNew shards can snap into place
A new shard no longer has to replay history from scratch. flightofthefox added a snap-sync protocol and a BoundaryStore that pins each shard's state at every epoch crossing. A joining shard downloads a recent checkpoint and catches up fast.
→ see “The Archive” on hyperscale.rsSplits and merges run for real
The simulator grew end-to-end scenarios: two sibling shards merging into their parent, a shard splitting live with observers tracking it, a validator relocating between shards. Adaptive sharding — the headline promise of M1 — is no longer just theory.
→ see “The Crash Lab” on hyperscale.rsThe bottom line
Standout change
The settled-waves fence is now in place, so cross-shard transactions survive a shard split or merge without getting lost or silently double-spent.
What's next
Likely next: stress-testing the reshape loop in the simulator with rougher scenarios — committee failures, validator drops mid-reshape, rotation stalls — before turning to the lottery-style validator shuffling also promised in M1.
This week's concept
The Will— A fence for transactions stranded by a reshapeMore than a third of the week's commits are about the settled-waves fence: the machinery that decides, safely and deterministically, what happens to cross-shard transactions when one of their shards disappears at a reshape.
hyperscale.rs Jargon, decoded
Straddler — A transaction that touches more than one shard, so it needs both shards to commit it together.
Snap-sync — A way for a new shard to download a recent checkpoint of state instead of replaying every block from the beginning.
Settled wave — A batch of cross-shard transactions that a shard has fully committed and won't reconsider.
Where the work landed
split, merge, and relocate e2e tests
settled-waves fence machinery
per-shard boundary data and QCs
Reference — concept map, roadmap & links▾
The full picture
The ClockConsensus-attested time across independent shards.
The CensusThe leaderless beacon of validators, stake and shards.
The OverlapWhy two conflicting blocks can never both commit.
The GeneralsAll-or-nothing cross-shard commits, computed not voted.
The ArchiveEvery published byte is preserved or provably expired.
The LibraryAll state in one merkle tree; a shard is a subtree.
The WillHow in-flight transactions settle when a shard dies.
The LotteryRandom, ever-moving committees; proven cheats are jailed.
The TriageUnder overload, urgent traffic never waits for bulk.
The GovernorValidator entry is re-priced every epoch, like a market.
The Crash LabThe simulator that replays any failure byte-for-byte.
The ProofProving safety with maths, not just tests.
The AsterisksEvery design's trade-offs — including Hyperscale's own.
The road to mainnet
Now: Milestone 1 · Adaptive Sharding — Week 7 · ~month 2 of 4 · 41%. Since day one: 2,324 commits — one developer, fully in public.
Links
Questions? flightofthefox is always happy to discuss in the community Telegram.
Written by AI from public commits, the community chat and hyperscale.rs — may contain mistakes. · generated 2026-07-09