MetaProof offers ‘incredibly efficient’ SPV queries for BSV businesses

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If you’re operating a high-transaction throughput project on the BSV blockchain, infrastructure developers Metastreme have new services to help. MetaProof offers SPV confirmations at a rate of thousands per second, with plans to scale dramatically upward in the coming months.

SPV, or Simplified Payment Verification, is described in Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 Bitcoin white paper as the ideal solution to confirming transactions as the blockchain grows to include unwieldy amounts of data. The problem has been at the heart of many Bitcoin scaling debates (and wars) over the years.

Transaction processors (miners) will always need to keep a complete copy of the Bitcoin blockchain. However, merchants and other service providers shouldn’t need to do so, and attempting to confirm transactions by downloading the entire blockchain becomes less practical for these operators with every passing month. SPV means services only need to confirm that past transaction headers are valid without looking at each block’s full contents. To give an idea of the difference this makes, the entire Bitcoin blockchain (since 2009) is now hundreds of gigabytes in size—but 13 years of block headers is a mere 50MB.

SPV requires additional services to work effectively, though, which is one of the reasons Bitcoin businesses have been slow to adopt it until recently. The LiteClient development team released its MVP of services called the SPV LiteClient Toolbox in May 2022, which incorporates several querying and messaging services to handle SPV functions.

MetaProof – SPV for #BSV. Our basic GUI means anyone can have a go just paste the TxID and get your proof. https://t.co/VbKvZ7y9mh pic.twitter.com/ufEQTcXgzq

— MetaStreme (@MetaStreme) September 22, 2022

MetaProof is separate from the LiteClient Toolbox project, although both adhere to the standard SPV formats published by the Bitcoin Association’s Technical Standards Committee (TSC).

MetaProof has been active since September 2022, and a handful of applications have begun integrating it. For now, MetaStreme is offering the MetaProof service for free to projects in the BSV industry, limited to 100 requests per second. It will soon offer larger rate plans.

Speaking to CoinGeek, Metastreme founder Paul Chiari said the project now has a roadmap in place for a “lite client” that can handle millions of requests per second. This could play a vital role in the future of mining infrastructure, one that will become more fragmented and specialized over time.

“SPV services have been in our development pipeline for some time and something we view as an integral component to the MetaStreme suite of services,” he said.

“Much of our developments to date have been focused on high volume transaction building and broadcasting, but at the same time, you need to have scalable and efficient methods of proving those transaction without the burden of running a full node,” he added.

MetaProof functions independently from the rest of the suite, allowing it to be used as a standalone service for the BSV blockchain. The current instance, he said, “is incredibly efficient,” can handle 1,000 requests per second comfortably, and is easily scalable. And that’s just for starters—tests on the next version of Metastreme’s lite client show it can handle 500,000 requests per second on a single multi-thread modern processor.

Metastreme will also soon have webhooks available, which enable applications to make single requests—the service will notify when a proof is available for specific transactions and update when new proofs if needed (e.g., in the case of a chain reorganization.) This will be available to all within a few weeks, though Chiari said they could accommodate individual requests sooner if they contact Metastreme directly.

“We see that as an important step, building scalable infrastructure,” he added. SPV is all about the inability (or at least the difficulty) to run a full node on a scalable blockchain like BSV. Metastreme wants to look at the actual issues that surround building a BSV business and solve them.

Watch: The BSV Global Blockchain Convention presentation, LiteClient: Scaling Blockchain with Simplified Payment Verification