Previously: flightofthefox had just rebuilt the crossing system, made forked shards recover from verified anchors, and got co-hosted validators seated into running shards.
Week 10 of Milestone 2 was a correctness blitz: 41 commits tightening how transactions hold locks, pay fees, and prove things to each other before their deadlines. In the chat, the community dug into the new VM's crypto plans, migration from Babylon, and a long, lively debate about who stores history.
+5.2k −1.6k
-58% vs last wk
lines changed
Commits / day
peak 29/day · 4/7 days active
Momentum
Lines changed / week
last 8 weeks
What flightofthefox built
Fees judged cell by cell
The VM now checks every debit against the fee holds standing on that exact account cell, and withholds credits from members that can settle without them. Fees get fairer and more precise as the engine takes shape.
→ see “The Journey” on hyperscale.rsLocks that can't deadlock
Dozens of fixes make two transactions circling the same state (a 'hold cycle') prove itself from readings taken before the deadline, then abort the later one. This is the cross-shard commit rule getting teeth.
→ see “The Generals” on hyperscale.rsSeating edge cases closed
Co-hosted validators can now be seated mid-flight, released once nothing awaits them, and loop-shared syncs follow the slowest seat. Committee rotation gets safer under live traffic.
→ see “The Lottery” on hyperscale.rsRecovery anchors made solid
Joining nodes re-read their anchor only when no peer holds it, and boundary pins are now retained in the production stores, not just the simulator. A restarted shard rebuilds from provable history.
→ see “The Library” on hyperscale.rsAlso this week
- Signatures are now verified one by one instead of trusting a batch total, closing a subtle forgery gap.
- Beacon candidates that arrive before their parent block are held until the parent exists.
- Provisions are refused for transactions a node can't route, avoiding wrong-shard deliveries.
- Simulator dispatch now draws runs from half the pool's bound upward, making tests faster.
- Orphaned documentation was reattached to the items it describes.
The bottom line
Standout change
Cross-shard locks now provably resolve by deadline readings and abort deadlocked transactions, closing a whole class of stuck-state failures.
What's next
Likely next: continuing the fee-hold and hold-cycle correctness work in the VM, and finishing the co-hosted validator seating path.
Heard in the chat
The mood: A big week for design debate: crypto support in the new VM, migration from Babylon, and a long thread about archive nodes and who should store history — plus some fun banter about bad movies.
“It's like running a database which doesn't just store all the tables, it stores every query ever made. It makes sense for a couple of infra players to do so… but not everyone”
— flightofthefox, in the community Telegram
flightofthefox explained
VM crypto plans
The VM will cover all major hash families, native signature verification (ed25519, secp256k1, ML-DSA65, maybe secp256r1 for passkeys), and complete native proof verifiers like SUI's fastcrypto.
Migration from Babylon
There's no closed door: even worst-case, existing contract state can be read out of Babylon, re-encoded, and re-homed into the new tree — he could rewrite every contract himself and it would still be fine.
Why validators shouldn't hoard
Validators only need current state to validate the next block; storing every old receipt just accumulates cost until operators quit — that's why archive nodes will be separate.
Native upgradability
He prefers native contract upgrade paths over hand-rolled proxy contracts, which in a sharded system drag two components — possibly on different shards — into needless overhead.
This week's concept
The Generals— The two generals put down their messengersMost of this week was about cross-shard locks, deadlines and tie-breaks — making sure two transactions fighting over the same state can never leave the network stuck or half-done.
hyperscale.rs/generals Jargon, decoded
Hold cycle — When two transactions each hold a lock the other needs, so neither can finish — the network now detects and breaks these by a fixed rule.
Archive node — A special node that keeps far more history than validators need, so gateways and explorers can look up old data.
Deadlock — The stuck state where two parts of the system each wait forever for the other to go first.
Where the work landed
lock and deadline rules tightened
fee holds and credits enforced
new multi-shard test scenarios
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 10 · since August 2026. Since day one: 5,326 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 2026-10-12