10 posts tagged with "Lattice"

For years, a comment in EtchStore.java read: "Garbage collection is left as an exercise for the reader." We're finally doing the exercise. Coming in Convex 0.8.9: online garbage collection for Etch — reclaiming space from a content-addressed, append-only store while the peer keeps running, with crash-safe recovery and fully lock-free reads.

Convex 0.8.7 ships something most decentralised networks still handle out-of-band with flag days and coordinated restarts: protocol upgrades scheduled on-chain, activating at a precise instant in consensus time, with the network's identity — its genesis hash — untouched. No hard fork, no new chain.

Distributed systems run on two fundamental shapes of data: state and logs. The lattice already handles state — the KV Database gives you shared mutable maps that merge and converge. The Lattice Queue now covers the other half: ordered, durable streams of events with Kafka-style semantics — topics, partitions, offsets, independent consumers — but with no broker cluster anywhere.

Convex 0.8.6 closes three authentication and merge-path weaknesses in the lattice's capability layer. Two of them were genuine bypasses in how UCAN tokens are verified and how capabilities are matched; the third turns a merge over untrusted data from a potential denial of service into a safe no-op. None of them are exotic — they are the kind of boundary bugs that hide in any authorisation system — and the fixes are worth writing down because the shape of each mistake is instructive.

Convex 0.8.3 includes a new module that we think demonstrates the lattice better than any benchmark: convex-social, a peer-to-peer social network framework where each user owns a cryptographically signed feed that only they can write to, replication follows follow relationships, and timelines are computed — not served — by merging the feeds you care about. There is no server. There is nothing to host.

DLFS — the Decentralised Lattice File System — now supports sparse files up to 9.2 exabytes (Long.MAX_VALUE bytes). Creating one is instant. Writing a single byte into the middle takes microseconds. Here's how we made that work with a handful of elegant tricks in Convex's immutable data layer.

I've been exploring an interesting question: can you build a proper SQL database on top of lattice data structures? Not a thin wrapper, but something that actually understands both worlds — SQL semantics and CRDT-style merge operations.

Turns out you can. Here's what I learned.

Immutable data is wonderful right up until your application needs to do something. Convex 0.8.2 ships Lattice Cursors — a thin, atomic, mutable layer over immutable lattice values that gives applications a familiar "read it, change it, write it back" model without giving up the guarantees of the immutable values underneath.

The day is finally coming.

Convex Protonet is going live in December 2024. Here's what you need to know about the launch of the first live Convex network — the foundation for everything we're building towards: fair, efficient decentralised economic systems at global scale.

A quick note on CAD3 because I think it is important for everyone to understand how important this is - it's also probably the last significant piece we NEED to get right before Protonet goes live.