Grandine AMA

@ Interop Event 2024

Huge thanks for inviting us!
There would be no Grandine without YOU!

History

• Started in 2019 as a side project;
• Already two other Rust clients back then - Lighthouse and Shasper;
• Received commercial grant (obligation to generate revenue);
• The first 0.1.0 binary release in 2021;
• Opensource in 2024;
• Team - 4 core + extra people;
• Used in production.

Architecture

• Original fork-choice implementation;
• Performance focused (parallelization, micro-optimisations);
• Low memory footprint (in-memory-only at the beginning);
• Tree-states;
• Thin database layer;
• Coupled beacon node and validator client.

Community crates

• Heavy usage of general purpose Rust community crates (~1000, Tokio, Axum etc.);
• rust-libp2p based networking crates by Lighthouse team;
• libmdbx-rs by Akula, later by Reth.

What drives development?

• Initially - isolated benchmarks (state transition function was ~3x faster than the next fast implementation);
• Later - qualitative comparision with the other implementations using Vouch;
• Latest - user feedback.

Research

• Mainly performance (speed, memory usage);
• Optimal attestations packer;
• Rust-kzg (parallel CPU, GPU, multibackend):
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AMA