Every cryptographic path is real, not stubbed. Twelve crates, 228 tests, MIT-licensed, public on GitHub. Research-grade — and honest about what that means.
Verifiable delay function from a SHA-256 hash chain. Sequential work is re-executed on verify, not just declared — a truncated chain or inflated num_hashes fails.
Votes on forks with doubling lockouts, so switching gets exponentially expensive. Votes are signed and rejected before they touch state. Stake-weighted strict 2/3.
Conflict analysis over read/write account sets. Disjoint accounts run in parallel; a write conflict serialises. Slot-based with a compute budget.
Systematic RS over GF(256) — any k of n reconstructs exactly, or the decoder returns None. Shreds propagate down a neighbourhood tree.
Cluster Replicated Data Store. Versioned membership with timeouts, push/pull, ping/pong. Outgoing signed; incoming that fails verify_strict is counted and dropped.
Not a simulated bus. Framed datagrams, gossip and TPU on separate sockets, signed shreds verified on receipt with dedup and slot pruning.
Append-only length-prefixed frames with checksums, so torn frames are rejected on replay. SlotMeta index, real fdatasync.
Append-only DB with a DashMap index for O(1) lookups, Merkle tree over sorted leaves. 10k accounts inserted in under 50 ms.
Bounded pool keyed by signature. verify_strict on admission, duplicates rejected, cheapest evicted at capacity. Drained highest-fee-first.
Native dispatcher: System (SOL transfers, account creation) and Token (SPL-like ops) with authority checks. No SBF runtime — unsupported fails honestly.
Accounts a transaction touches are snapshotted; if any instruction fails they're rolled back. The fee stays charged — correct Solana semantic.
getAccountInfo, getBalance, sendTransaction, getSlot and friends, backed by the DB and blockstore.
Real: the crypto (verify_strict, full signing layout), PoH with genuine sequential verification, the blockstore, Reed-Solomon erasure coding, scheduler conflict analysis, fee-priority mempool, signed shreds over real UDP, transactional rollback, token authorization, stake-weighted finality. Multiple nodes converge on identical blocks.
Out of scope: SBF runtime, QUIC, snapshot loading. This is a research-grade validator, not an audited production one.
solana-* for familiarity. The code is written from scratch — the whitepaper and design docs were the reference, nothing else.