Previously: flightofthefox had just landed the settled-waves fence for straddlers, the first end-to-end shard split and merge in the simulator, and per-shard boundary QCs anchoring crossings in the beacon — work moving from parts t
A heads-down, no-chat week focused on closing the gap between the simulator and the real network. flightofthefox made the sim mirror production at the same epoch length and with the same follower pools, multiplied the end-to-end tests on the production side, and quietly introduced the first on-chain knob validators can vote to retune. The foundations are starting to feel production-shaped.
+10k −4.1k
-26% vs last wk
lines changed
Commits / day
peak 16/day · 7/7 days active
Momentum
Lines changed / week
last 8 weeks
What flightofthefox built
Validators get a live tuning knob
flightofthefox added NetworkParams to the beacon at genesis and a way for stake-pool votes to retune them at runtime. It's the first self-governing dial in Hyperscale — a thermostat the community can turn, not a setting frozen by the developers.
→ see “The Governor” on hyperscale.rsThe simulator catches up to production
flightofthefox rebuilt the sim around the same epoch length and follower pool the real network uses, made message iteration deterministic, and added request retries and simulated latency. The crash lab is now a faithful rehearsal space, not a smaller parallel world.
→ see “The Crash Lab” on hyperscale.rsReshape gets production-grade tests
End-to-end tests for the split, the merge, and straddler settlement across the reshape boundary all turned on in production. The pacemaker now starts the moment a new shard is seated, cohort seeds lock at split time, and a merge parent composes cleanly from its child terminals.
→ see “The Will” on hyperscale.rsThe bottom line
Standout change
The simulator and the production test suite are now running the same epochs, the same follower pools, and deterministic iteration — the first realistic dress rehearsal for a public testnet.
What's next
Likely next: stabilise the production reshape test suite under fault scenarios before moving on to the lottery-style validator shuffling also promised in M1.
This week's concept
The Crash Lab— Replay every bug byte-for-byteThis week's biggest theme was the simulator and production test suite converging onto the same epochs, the same follower pools, and deterministic iteration — turning the crash lab into a realistic dress rehearsal for a public testnet.
hyperscale.rs Jargon, decoded
NetworkParams — The on-chain settings that describe how the network runs — like timeouts and committee sizes — stored in the beacon so validators can vote t
Stake pool — A group of XRD holders who delegate their stake to a single validator so they can vote and earn rewards together.
Cohort seed — A random number that locks in exactly which validators get assigned to a brand-new shard the moment it splits off.
Where the work landed
mirrors production epochs and follower pool
beacon-follower pool and route gate
NetworkParams and stake-pool voting
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 8 · ~month 2 of 4 · 47%. 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