PulseChain Node

The repo holds the PulseChain fork of Go-Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain. Credit to the wealth of upstream development this project is built upon.

PulseChain is a stateful fork of Ethereum running Proof of Staked Authority consensus system with the stated goals of increased performance and significantly reduced fees for the users of the ecosystem. As a stateful fork, copies of all Ethereum contracts, tokens, and user accounts at time of fork will exist in the PulseChain network.

Being a fork of Go-Ethereum, many of the Go-Ethereum binaries and tools you're familiar with remain the same (geth, bootnode, puppeth, etc).

The Proof of Staked Authority (PoSA) consensus engine developed for BSC is based on the Clique consensus engine detailed in EIP-225, with validators tracking and selection being dictated by system contracts. Validator rotation on BSC is administered through cross-chain messages originating from Binance Chain. PulseChain simplifies this system by removing the dual chain complexity and by implementing validator staking and rotation as native system contracts that can be directly interacted with by the PulseChain users. Slashing logic ensures liveness, security, stability, and chain finality.

The PulseChain network will launch with a stable set of maintained validators. Tech-savvy PulseChain users are encouraged to deploy new independent validators that can be voted into the network consensus by the PulseChain users, aiding in the decentralization of the network.

Key features

Stateful Ethereum Fork

PulseChain brings all of the Ethereum state with it! As of block number _______ (TBD), Exact copies of all smart contracts, ERC-20 tokens, ERC-721 NFTs, and user accounts will exist on PulseChain. Because of the extent of applications and use cases deployed on the Ethereum mainnet, it's not possible to anticipate exactly how any cloned assets will be valued by the community. Some contracts and applications will work 100% as they do on Ethereum, other contracts such as centralized stable coins are unlikely to have the authoritative support behind them.

Eventually the relative value of these assets will equalize though market action, but it is expected that there will be a discovery period with high volatility at launch of the network.

Proof of Staked Authority

Although Proof-of-Work (PoW) has been proven as a mechanism to implement a decentralized network, it is not practical for new or small networks and requires a large number of participants and computational waste to maintain the security.

Proof-of-Authority(PoA) provides defense against 51% attack, with improved efficiency and tolerance to certain levels of Byzantine players (malicious or hacked). The PoA protocol however is most criticized for being not as decentralized as PoW, as the validators, i.e. the nodes that take turns to produce blocks, have all the authorities and are prone to corruption and security attacks.

Other blockchains, such as EOS and Cosmos both, introduce different types of Deputy Proof of Stake (DPoS) to allow the token holders to vote and elect the validator set. It increases the decentralization and favors community governance.

PulseChain inherits and modifies the Binance Smart Chain consensus engine, Parlia, which combines DPoS and PoA. The PulseChain consensus engine has the following properties:

1. Blocks are produced by a limited set of validators.
2. Validators take turns to produce blocks in a PoA manner, similar to Ethereum's Clique consensus engine.
3. Validator set are elected in and out based on a staking contracts implemented on PulseChain.
4. Validator set rotation occurs on a regular interval with applicable validators chosen from the staking contract (selecting the validators with the bonded stake)
5. The consensus engine will interact directly with the slash, staking, and validator system-contracts to achieve liveness and stability, revenue distribution, and validator rotation.

Native Token

The native ETH token will become PLS on the PulseChain network. The PLS supply will be inflated by at least 10,000x upon forking, with the extra supply being distributed to the users that sacrificed during the PulseChain sacrifice phase.

PLS will be used just as ETH is used on the Ethereum network for transaction fees, as well as for delegating stake to network validators.

Building the source

Many of the below are the same as or similar to go-ethereum.

For prerequisites and detailed build instructions please read the Installation Instructions.

Building geth requires both a Go (version 1.14 or later) and a C compiler. You can install them using your favourite package manager. Once the dependencies are installed, run

make geth

or, to build the full suite of utilities:

make all

Building docker images

Multiple Dockerfiles are provided for different build strategies:

• Dockerfile: The minimal build, including only the geth command.
• Dockerfile.alltools: An image containing the full suite of utilities generated from make all.
• Dockerfile.debug: A debug build including the dlv command for running a Delve server that enables remote debugging.

The Makefile provides convenient targets for building and tagging docker builds. These make targets accept an optional TAG var, which should be set to a semantic version number when possible.

# build the minimal image inclduing only geth
make docker # => produces docker image "registry.gitlab.com/pulsechaincom/go-pulse:latest"
make TAG=0.0.0 docker # => produces docker image "registry.gitlab.com/pulsechaincom/go-pulse:0.0.0"

# build the alltools image with extra utilities
make docker-alltools # => produces docker image "registry.gitlab.com/pulsechaincom/go-pulse:alltools"
make TAG=0.0.0 docker-alltools # => produces docker image "registry.gitlab.com/pulsechaincom/go-pulse:0.0.0-alltools"

# build the debug image include dlv server
make docker-debug # => produces docker image "registry.gitlab.com/pulsechaincom/go-pulse:debug"
make TAG=0.0.0 docker-debug # => produces docker image "registry.gitlab.com/pulsechaincom/go-pulse:0.0.0-debug"

or, to build all 3 docker images:

make TAG=0.0.0 docker-all

Executables

The PulseChain project comes with several wrappers/executables found in the cmd directory.

Command	Description
geth	Main PulseChain client binary. It is the entry point into the Pulse network (main-, test- or private net), capable of running as a full node (default), archive node (retaining all historical state) or a light node (retrieving data live). It has the same and more RPC and other interface as go-ethereum and can be used by other processes as a gateway into the Pulse network via JSON RPC endpoints exposed on top of HTTP, WebSocket and/or IPC transports. geth --help and the CLI page for command line options.
clef	Stand-alone signing tool, which can be used as a backend signer for geth.
devp2p	Utilities to interact with nodes on the networking layer, without running a full blockchain.
abigen	Source code generator to convert Ethereum contract definitions into easy to use, compile-time type-safe Go packages. It operates on plain Ethereum contract ABIs with expanded functionality if the contract bytecode is also available. However, it also accepts Solidity source files, making development much more streamlined. Please see our Native DApps page for details.
bootnode	Stripped down version of our Ethereum client implementation that only takes part in the network node discovery protocol, but does not run any of the higher level application protocols. It can be used as a lightweight bootstrap node to aid in finding peers in private networks.
evm	Developer utility version of the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) that is capable of running bytecode snippets within a configurable environment and execution mode. Its purpose is to allow isolated, fine-grained debugging of EVM opcodes (e.g. evm --code 60ff60ff --debug run).
rlpdump	Developer utility tool to convert binary RLP (Recursive Length Prefix) dumps (data encoding used by the Ethereum protocol both network as well as consensus wise) to user-friendlier hierarchical representation (e.g. rlpdump --hex CE0183FFFFFFC4C304050583616263).

Running geth

Going through all the possible command line flags is out of scope here (please consult our CLI Wiki page), but we've enumerated a few common parameter combos to get you up to speed quickly on how you can run your own geth instance.

Hardware Requirements

The hardware must meet certain requirements to run a full node.

• VPS running recent versions of Mac OS X or Linux.
• 1T of SSD storage for mainnet, 500G of SSD storage for testnet.
• 8 cores of CPU and 32 gigabytes of memory (RAM) for mainnet.
• 4 cores of CPU and 8 gigabytes of memory (RAM) for testnet.
• A broadband Internet connection with upload/download speeds of at least 10 megabyte per second

$ geth console

This command will:

• Start geth in fast sync mode (default, can be changed with the --syncmode flag), causing it to download more data in exchange for avoiding processing the entire history of the Ethereum network, which is very CPU intensive.
• Start up geth's built-in interactive JavaScript console, (via the trailing console subcommand) through which you can interact using web3 methods (note: the web3 version bundled within geth is very old, and not up to date with official docs), as well as geth's own management APIs. This tool is optional and if you leave it out you can always attach to an already running geth instance with geth attach.

A Full node on the PulseChain Testnet

TODO Provide instructions here once the PulseChain testnet is live.

Note: Although there are some internal protective measures to prevent transactions from crossing over between the main network and test network, you should make sure to always use separate accounts for play-money and real-money. Unless you manually move accounts, geth will by default correctly separate the two networks and will not make any accounts available between them.

Configuration

As an alternative to passing the numerous flags to the geth binary, you can also pass a configuration file via:

$ geth --config /path/to/your_config.toml

To get an idea how the file should look like you can use the dumpconfig subcommand to export your existing configuration:

$ geth --your-favourite-flags dumpconfig

Programmatically interfacing geth nodes

As a developer, sooner rather than later you'll want to start interacting with geth and the PulseChain network via your own programs and not manually through the console. To aid this, geth has built-in support for a JSON-RPC based APIs (standard APIs and geth specific APIs). These can be exposed via HTTP, WebSockets, and IPC (UNIX sockets on UNIX based platforms, and named pipes on Windows).

The IPC interface is enabled by default and exposes all the APIs supported by geth, whereas the HTTP and WS interfaces need to manually be enabled and only expose a subset of APIs due to security reasons. These can be turned on/off and configured as you'd expect.

HTTP based JSON-RPC API options:

• --http Enable the HTTP-RPC server
• --http.addr HTTP-RPC server listening interface (default: localhost)
• --http.port HTTP-RPC server listening port (default: 8545)
• --http.api API's offered over the HTTP-RPC interface (default: eth,net,web3)
• --http.corsdomain Comma separated list of domains from which to accept cross origin requests (browser enforced)
• --ws Enable the WS-RPC server
• --ws.addr WS-RPC server listening interface (default: localhost)
• --ws.port WS-RPC server listening port (default: 8546)
• --ws.api API's offered over the WS-RPC interface (default: eth,net,web3)
• --ws.origins Origins from which to accept websockets requests
• --ipcdisable Disable the IPC-RPC server
• --ipcapi API's offered over the IPC-RPC interface (default: admin,debug,eth,miner,net,personal,shh,txpool,web3)
• --ipcpath Filename for IPC socket/pipe within the datadir (explicit paths escape it)

You'll need to use your own programming environments' capabilities (libraries, tools, etc) to connect via HTTP, WS, or IPC to a geth node configured with the above flags and you'll need to speak JSON-RPC on all transports. You can reuse the same connection for multiple requests!

Note: Please understand the security implications of opening up an HTTP/WS based transport before doing so! Hackers on the internet are actively trying to subvert PulseChain nodes with exposed APIs! Further, all browser tabs can access locally running web servers, so malicious web pages could try to subvert locally available APIs!

Contribution

Thank you for considering to help out with the source code! We welcome contributions from anyone on the internet, and are grateful for even the smallest of fixes!

If you'd like to contribute to PulseChain, please fork, fix, commit, and send a pull request for the maintainers to review and merge into the main code base. If you wish to submit more complex changes though, please check up with the core devs first on our telegram channel to ensure those changes are in line with the general philosophy of the project and/or get some early feedback which can make both your efforts much lighter as well as our review and merge procedures quick and simple.

Please make sure your contributions adhere to our coding guidelines:

• Code must adhere to the official Go formatting guidelines (i.e. uses gofmt).
• Code must be documented adhering to the official Go commentary guidelines.
• Pull requests need to be based on and opened against the master branch.
• Commit messages should be prefixed with the package(s) they modify.
  • E.g. "eth, rpc: make trace configs optional"

Please see the Developers' Guide for more details on configuring your environment, managing project dependencies, and testing procedures.

License

The PulseChain Node library (i.e. all code outside of the cmd directory) is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0, also included in our repository in the COPYING.LESSER file.

The PulseChain Node binaries (i.e. all code inside of the cmd directory) is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0, also included in our repository in the COPYING file.