Previously: flightofthefox had rewritten the VM execution model around a single core boundary — the largest architectural change of Milestone 2 so far.
Building on last week's VM rewrite, flightofthefox shifted into a massive pricing and resource-budgeting push — the fee system that lets the network charge transactions for exactly what they cost. The week also saw the account recovery model, block sync, and cross-shard settlement all take major steps forward. A heavy, broad week.
408
+48% vs last wk
commits
+18k −9.1k
-21% vs last wk
lines changed
Commits / day
peak 120/day · 6/7 days active
Momentum
Lines changed / week
last 8 weeks
What flightofthefox built
Transactions priced by what they touch
flightofthefox wired per-leaf read costs, per-event framing charges, and scan pricing into execution — and moved the price table onto the beacon. Transactions now pay for exactly the resources they consume.
→ see “The Governor” on hyperscale.rsOne intent to compose them all
The authorization model was unified around a single recursive intent — every transaction is one intent that composes others, each signed and nullified independently, eliminating scattered routing types.
→ see “The Journey” on hyperscale.rsAccount recovery roles defined
New VM roles — a primary, a veto role, and a second factor — let an account freeze, amend guardians, or instantly rotate, all governed by on-chain rules rather than trust.
→ see “The System” on hyperscale.rsSync frontiers and halted tips
Block sync moved into a proper state machine, and halted-tip recovery was rebuilt to harvest from verified timeouts and screen committee membership before committing.
→ see “The Archive” on hyperscale.rsCross-shard settlement tightens
Provision windows are now shared rather than mirrored, dropped bundles satisfy their askers, and unjudged fees settle against what the payer holds — tightening the commit path.
→ see “The Generals” on hyperscale.rsDeparted shards retired cleanly
Shard termination rules hardened: departed shards retire when their evidence window closes, terminated chains stop composing ticks, and expired pools are bounded.
→ see “The Will” on hyperscale.rsAlso this week
- Wallets can now ask a node for a read-only preview of what a transaction would do before submitting it.
- Shard splits can now trigger automatically when a shard runs near its capacity limits.
- Network delay is estimated from the committed chain, driving round timers and fetch timeouts.
- Quorum timestamps are now taken as the median of voter clock readings, smoothing the attested clock.
- A simulated Byzantine sender can now rewrite notifications and gossip, strengthening fault injection.
- Retention costs are now weighed by the actual bytes a validator keeps.
- Each shard attests its own emission share and is verified on every shard.
- Messages must now state their class explicitly rather than defaulting, improving network prioritization.
The bottom line
Standout change
The fee and resource-pricing system was wired end-to-end — from per-leaf read costs to the beacon's price table — the biggest push toward making transactions pay their own way.
What's next
Likely next: continuing to wire the fee system into the execution lifecycle and pushing the intent model toward feature parity with Babylon's component model.
Heard in the chat
The mood: Heated community debate about Hyperscale's future relationship to Radix, including a long proposal from Wim about a possible funded restart. flightofthefox stayed focused on honest trade-offs.
“blockchains can't be the best across every dimension simultaneously. you have to pick and choose your battles”
— flightofthefox, in the community Telegram
flightofthefox explained
Hyperscale's core trade-off
Finality is the trade-off — it's always quicker to execute in blocks than go through async execution for cross-shard. If you don't need more than one shard, it's a strict downgrade.
Who should use Hyperscale
Literally zero point using it unless you have a plausible situation with hundreds of thousands or millions of state transitions.
Long-term plans
I'll work on other things after it's stable and just maintain it. Can't work on open source forever unless networks sponsor it.
Market positioning
The market for transactions that can tolerate a few extra seconds is larger than the market for sub-second finality — until low-latency chains run out of blockspace, the benefits of shards will be non-obvious.
This week's concept
The Governor— A governor, not a voteThe dominant work was pricing: per-leaf reads, per-event framing, scan costs, and moving the price table onto the beacon — the economic layer that makes every transaction pay its own way.
hyperscale.rs/governor Jargon, decoded
Intent — A signed authorization that names which accounts and state a transaction touches, now unified into one recursive structure.
Leaf — A single data entry in the state tree; the unit the fee system charges for reading or writing.
Preview — A read-only dry run that tells a wallet what a transaction would do before it is submitted.
Provision — A piece of state one shard sends another, proven against a committed block.
Where the work landed
sync FSM, halted-tip recovery, provisions
fee pricing and resource budgeting wired in
intent model and account authorization
fuzz tests and CI blob alignment
shard termination and departed retirement
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
✓ M1
Adaptive Sharding
~4 mo
Now: Milestone 2 · Radix Engine — Week 7 · since August 2026. Since day one: 4,918 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 2026-09-21