Cardano network connects thousands of nodes into one unified system
The Cardano IOG is about to set a milestone in Mithril’s solution as CTO. romain pelerin, tweeted about bootstrapping a Cardano node via Mithril Snapshot in a matter of minutes. Mithril was listed as one of the ways that Cardano intended to scale at the beginning of the year. Cardano builder IOG introduced Mithril during the 2021 Cardano Summit. Since then, the team has made steady development progress.
The IOG team recently stated it has been working on a first use case to leverage Mithril to quickly and efficiently bootstrap a full Cardano node.
The Cardano network connects thousands of nodes into a unified system, where they communicate with other nodes to provide information about new blocks and transactions. Since each node holds a complete copy of the blockchain, synchronizing the nodes requires each new node to download and verify each block, which adds time to the process.
Mithril aims to use the current network to give certified snapshots of all or a portion of the blockchain state, thereby significantly cutting down on node synchronization time.
Here’s How Far Mithril Has Gone
As stated in a recent blog post, the team is in the final stages of optimizing and testing the Mithril network in its first centralized version. Additional use cases will be introduced, such as integrating Mithril into wallets and lightweight clients.
Now that Mithril is open source, the team has kept working on the certification of the SPOs registering in the Mithril network and on the new version of the release procedure, as was mentioned in the most recent IOG weekly update. The current Mithril test environment is being run at the moment with pioneer SPOs.
The same idea of stake that underlies Ouroboros proof-of-stake consensus mechanism is the foundation of Mithril. Stakeholders in Ouroboros are chosen at random to produce blocks, with a chance commensurate with the amount of ownership or representative they own. Mithril allows participants to sign the current ledger position using a lottery system, where the probability of their contribution is also proportional to their stake.
