Ghost Development Update (March 2022)

Ghost
3 min readMar 5, 2022

Back in September when we hard forked to re-enable anonymous transactions we included an additional privacy layer to the Ghost blockchain. This additional layer, Dandelion++, was a nightmare for development to say the least. Those who have had experience implementing this protocol into their blockchain are aware of the monumental task Dandelion endures. The protocol was originally developed for Bitcoin back in 2017 (BIP156), but was never implemented. Because of this, programmers have to develop a large portion of the protocol itself to be compatible with their blockchain. This is especially true due to there being three levels of bitcoin-core being released since the inception of this protocol.

In the early stages of implementing Dandelion, ghost-core was crashing upon boot and in some cases unable to even boot. This is because the protocol works at the consensus level and executes traffic scrambling throughout the network’s nodes. Once Dandelion was able to communicate with the nodes in a manner that wouldn't crash the core, it was deemed successful and thus included in the preceding hard fork.

After further monitoring of how Dandelion was reacting in the production environment, our cryptographers determined the protocol posed a risk to the network. It was discovered that some functional tests were not processed by our lead dev at the time, which…

--

--

Ghost

Ghost is a Decentralized Proof-of-Stake Privacy Coin engineered to make you nothing but a “ghost” while transacting online.