Threat posed by Paradigm Akula decides to cease operations

New York City: The Akula Ethereum client is notable for its lightning-fast speed. Clients are bits of software that allow nodes to interface with the blockchain and carry out smart contract execution. Artem Vorotnikov, a key developer on Ethereum, formed a small team of programmers in the year 2021 with the intention of developing the project as an open-source user implementation.

The completion of this development work was announced in a statement that was published on Wednesday. The fact that the source code for the project is open-source assures that it will always be available to users, despite the fact that the original developers of the project are no longer actively managing it. In addition, the announcement said that a rival node client had just been developed by a group that had greater resources, although it did not indicate whose group this belonged to.

Following OpenEthereum’s collapse, we saw the need for a fresh Ethereum implementation written in Rust that offered improved performance. Therefore, we got started on the Akula project the year before last. As a result of the substantial amount of past work that we had done on Erigon, we also held “knowledge.”

Because almost all of the basic building parts needed to be hand-coded from scratch, getting started was a challenge for Artem. A few examples include the development of devp2p, a fast RLP library, and bindings for the integrated database MDBX. These are only few of the examples. After some time, more developers joined in on the project, and as a result, we now have a state root calculator as well as a downloader for frame and header files, much as Erigon.

It is an amazing feat that was accomplished by a very small crew in a relatively short amount of time. It is only predictable that now that Akula has real users, it would have difficulties in providing assistance. Recent events have brought to our knowledge the existence of an other Ethereum implementation written in Rust. This implementation has virtually the same scope as Akula and some building blocks that are similar to Akula.

In a short amount of time, it will be made available to the general public as open source. After extensive discussion, we have reached the conclusion that we will no longer provide Akula with any kind of assistance, whether financial, managerial, or technical assistance. We predict that once the other project is released under an open source license, it will gain more attention and financing, ultimately catching up to the feature set of Akula, and maybe even exceeding it before too long.

We are unable to find a justification for devoting our limited resources to Akula since there is no reason to believe that it will continue to be supported by finances in the future (this is how it is funded at the moment). On the other hand, we are aware that the group that is driving this new venture has a great deal more authority and resources than we have.

Due to the fact that its source code is freely available to the public and that it is a public project, the Akula project cannot be “shut down” or “closed,” since anybody may construct their own version and continue working on it. Nevertheless, according to a tweet by Artem Vorotnikov, project management and the transfer of technology are getting very close to being finished.

Vorotnikov has indicated that he would pause his contributions to Ethereum for an indefinite period of time. In addition to that, he has been contributing to the Go version of a client for Ethereum called Erigon.