WesoForge recently launched and is gamifying Bluebox Timelord participation in compactifying the Chia blockchain. By earning $Weso tokens for compacting proofs, WesoForge creates a fun incentive for this often overlooked public service known as Blueboxing.
What is Blueboxing?
The Chia consensus protocol relies on Proofs of Space and Time. Farmers provide Proofs of Space with plots on their drives, while Timelords provide Proofs of Time that “infuse” the chain. It really only takes one timelord to move the chain forward, and this is often referred to as the “fastest timelord” — they prioritize speed and as a result end up with proofs that are larger and take more computational effort to validate.
There is an optional step called “Blueboxing” (a Doctor Who reference) where a different type of timelord known as Bluebox Timelords, scans the blockchain for uncompacted proofs and replace them with equally valid but smaller proofs. This compacting reduces the overall database size and makes proof of time validations faster when syncing a chain from genesis or from a snapshot.
Blueboxing was a thankless service
Historically, blueboxing was seen as a public service that benefits the entire network, but there was no direct reward for doing so. At one point there was a community effort to keep the chain compact, and in fact, the chain did reach basically full compactness in late 2022! Over time, blueboxing mostly fell by the wayside, and the process became more intensive when ASIC Timelords came online in late 2023. These significantly faster timelords added security to the chain through much “harder” Proofs of Time which also meant blueboxing became more computationally expensive to compact for subsequent blocks.
And up until a week ago, only about 37% of all blocks were compacted, with that percentage steadily falling — until WesoForge.
Enter WesoForge
WesoForge was created by community member Eal (@Ealrann on GitHub and X) and he was able to deliver multiple things:
- Optimized the bluebox timelord library (Ealrann/chiavdf) to consume less memory and disable inner multi-threading
- Created a multi-threaded wrapper (CLI and GUI version) to allow “one-click” compacting of multiple proofs in parallel
- Released open source code and prebuilt binaries for Windows and Linux (Gene Hoffman contributed macOS binaries later)
- Created a work distribution server to assign or “lease” proofs to users for 60 minutes
- Minted $Weso, a single-issuance CAT to distribute to users for each compacted block
- Created a dashboard with stats and leaderboard to further gamify the efforts
In my opinion, the centralized work distribution was one of the key components here to ensure multiple users don’t waste effort working on the same Proof of Time as the community churns through the backlog of uncompacted blocks. As long as a user can submit a compacted proof within 60 minutes of being assigned a proof, they will receive the $Weso token reward.
The Race is On for $Weso
Although $Weso has no intrinsic value, its purpose as a fun reward incentive seems to have done its job for driving interest and competition for blueboxing.
$Weso also has tokenomics worth noting, including a fixed supply and diminishing distribution according to a halving schedule. It’s also worth mentioning that the easiest time to compact blocks is *now* while there remains a large backlog of uncompacted blocks.
Right now, anyone with a modest modern CPU should have no trouble finding compact proofs within 60 minutes, and more cores will scale linearly to compacting more proofs in parallel.
However, once the chain is fully compacted, only brand new proofs of times (about 1 every 15 seconds) will be eligible for compacting and it could turn blueboxing into a PoW-style race where only the fastest bluebox timelord will have their compact proof recognized. At that point, CPU single-core speed could become the most important factor.
At the current pace, the chain should be fully compacted within the next couple weeks, so the race is on for $Weso!
Why Participate? What’s the Actual Impact?
For the network, when the chain is fully compact, it will result in a smaller blockchain database, faster sync times, and less network bandwidth — all of which can marginally lower the resource barrier to running a full node. To keep things in perspective, the expected database size reduction is under 3 GB which is a ~1.4% reduction of the current database size of ~210 GB. More important is the faster validation time for full nodes initially syncing and also staying caught up with new blocks as they propagate.
For the individual, there are bragging rights in having the fastest bluebox timelords and being on top of the leaderboard. The $Weso token could also be thought of as a proxy for altruism and network participation. WesoForge creator Eal has also mentioned potential use for $Weso in his upcoming projects, though no further details have been shared yet.
See you on the Weso leaderboards and happy blueboxing!
Editor’s Note: As with any third party software, do take all necessary precautions to ensure the safety of your device and network.
