Reorganization
Neptune is a blockchain which features recursive STARK proofs as part of its consensus mechanism. This implies that participants can synchronize trustlessly by simply downloading the latest block and verifying this. Unlike most other blockchains, it is not necessary to download all historical blocks to get a cryptographically verified view of the state of the blockchain.
It is possible, though, to run an archival node that downloads all historical blocks. This archival node comes with additional functionality such as being able to reconstruct transaction's membership proofs, provide some historical transaction statistics, and allow other archival nodes to synchronize.
This document provides an overview of how different parts of the client's state handle reorganizations.
State overview
The client's state consists of the following parts:
- wallet
- light state
- archival state (optional)
- mempool
The wallet handles transactions that the client holds the spending keys for. The light state contains the latest block which verifies the validity of the entire history of the blockchain. The archival state is optional and allows, among other things, the client to re-synchronize wallets that are no longer up-to-date. The mempool keeps track of transactions that are not yet included in blocks, thus allowing miners to confirm transactions by picking some from the mempool to include in the next block.
Wallet
The wallet can handle reorganizations that are up to n blocks deep, where n
can be controlled with the CLI argument number_of_mps_per_utxo.
Reorganizations that are deeper than this will make the membership proofs of
the transactions temporarily invalid until they can be recovered either through
the client's own archival state (if it exists), or through a peer's archival
state. This recovery process happens automatically.
Light State
The light state only contains the latest block and thus can handle arbitrarily deep reorganizations.
Archival State
The archival state can handle arbitrarily deep reorganizations.
Mempool
The mempool can currently not handle reorganizations. If a reorganization occurs, all transactions in the mempool will be deleted, and the initiator of a transaction will have to publish the transaction again. The transactions that were included in blocks that are abandoned through this reorganization are not added to the mempool again, they also have to be published again.