BSV announces the availability of ARC public beta

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ZUG, Switzerland, Sept. 8, 2023 – The BSV Association is delighted to announce that the open-source ARC service is entering public beta as of September 2023. The ground-breaking transaction processor for BSV Blockchain, ARC, operates on a microservices architecture, aims to replace mAPI and provides a flexible, scalable solution tailored to specific use cases.

With mAPI, builders would send transactions to a miner’s mAPI endpoints and onto their respective mining nodes, which would then broadcast them to the BSV network. However, if that node is busy then the builders might face a degradation in service responsiveness. On the other hand, ARC revolutionizes this process by enabling direct peer-to-peer transactions to the network. This eliminates the dependency on a single node, thereby improving its robustness. ARC is horizontally scalable, with each instance capable of independently validating and propagating transactions using the provided information. This allows operators to spin up more instances according to the transaction volume they receive, improving ARC’s scalability.

Thomas Giacomo, Director at BSV Association, said, “ARC is the new generation of transaction processor replacing mAPI. It is installed by miners and these miners provide the ARC endpoints to application builders to send transactions to the chain. I extend my congratulations to the ARC team who made this launch possible in such a short space of time and who were deeply involved in developing the project. ARC is a cool product which will allow the BSV Blockchain to deliver what it has committed to deliver — 1 million tx/a second as a first step. It is the goal to have application builders shift from mAPI to ARC endpoints by the end of the year, with mAPI ideally phased out by the start of next year.”

The microservices are as follows:

• API: The API microservice is the main entry point for transactions in the ARC system. It handles authentication, validation, and transmission of transactions to Metamorph. Through client-based, round-robin load balancing, the API communicates with one or more instances of Metamorph.
• Metamorph: Processes transactions sent by the API to the Bitcoin network and handles the re-transmission of transactions if not acknowledged within a designated timeframe. It is designed to scale horizontally, with each instance operating independently and maintaining its transaction store.
• BlockTx: Another microservice, that handles the processing of mined blocks from the Bitcoin network and delivers transaction status updates to subscribed Metamorph instances. Its primary role is to avoid the redundant processing of large blocks. It does not store transaction data; it only stores transaction IDs and corresponding block heights.
• Callbacker: A simple microservice, that provides callbacks to clients when their transactions are accepted by the Bitcoin network. Clients can register a callback by including the X-Callback-URL header in their requests. Upon acceptance, Callbacker sends a POST request to the specified URL, including the transaction ID in the request body.

Since ARC is microservice based, it is expected to be significantly more scalable than mAPI. As part of their commitment to seamless integration, BSVA is diligently adapting ARC to all the other upcoming infrastructure changes of the BSV Blockchain, including LiteClient, overlay node, and Teranode.

You can learn more about the ARC project and access the associated documentation here.

About BSV Blockchain

One Blockchain for Everyone.

The BSV Association leads the BSV Blockchain for Enterprise and Blockchain for Government initiatives. This Switzerland-based global non-profit industry organisation supports the use of the BSV blockchain.

The BSV Association oversees the creation of technical standards and educates enterprises, government agencies, start-up ventures, developers, and users on creating a global blockchain ecosystem. The original Bitcoin protocol and its scripting language provide powerful technical capabilities that BSV has restored.

Lightning Sharks, on behalf of the BSV Association
Key contact: Haris Khan  [email protected] - +44 (0) 7503 581 563