Gnosis has released a statement that it intends to move on from their current OpenEthereum project and suggest users migrate to their new Erigon Ethererum client.
Gnosis has been leading the charge to develop OpenEthereum by taking over maintenance of the important codebase over the last 18 months. Now, the company has announced that the development has hit a wall. Gnosis says that it is no longer a possibility to implement the desired protocol improvement, due to the limitation of a 200.000-line codebase that is more than five years old.
For the project to continue as is, a major codebase refactoring would be necessary but the process is very slow and would just cover up the problem, instead of solving the underlying issue. That issue is that of a monolithic architecture that is holding itself back from Gnosis’s so-called “modular client vision.”
Gnosis moving on from OpenEthereum
Due to those issues, Gnosis will cease their maintenance and support of what they are now calling OpenEthereum 3.x, after an update scheduled in July. They recommend that users of OpenEthereum 3.x begin the shift to a new Erigon Ethereum Client.
Gnosis and Erigon started working together back in 2020 to make this transition as seamless as possible for those choosing the migrate to the new client. Erigon’s founder, Alexy Akhonov added that the two groups are committed to “filling functionality gaps,” while also making sure that these improvements “will fit into the overarching architecture for building Ethereum implementations.”
While Erigon has been leading that charge, Gnosis will back them up full time after the July OpenEthereum 3.x update is finalized. CTO of Gnosis Stefan George spoke about the pairing in the post saying:
“We took over OpenEthereum to support Ethereum 1.x development. Alexey has a great vision for Ethereum 1.x client development and assembled a great team to execute on this vision: Building a modular client allowing to scale development and increase the speed of innovation on many dimensions like sync speed and disk usage. We want to help Ethereum to push the limits of what is possible on Ethereum today and see Erigon as the foundation.”
George goes on to state that users needn’t worry about any missing features because the two teams have been working hard to ensure that all features OpenEthereum 3.x currently provides will be supported on Erigon. This includes OpenEthereum 3.x’s tracing abilities.
Difference of the Erigon client compared to OpenEthereum 3.x
According to the statement, Erigon will be a next-generation solution that rolls out a couple of new concepts as far as ETH clients go. One of these benefits is a faster sync speed that bumps OpenEthereum’s <1blk/s mark up to >10 blk/s at tip for the Erigon client.
This will allow archive nodes to be bootstrapped in less than three days. Additionally, the new “flat” model of storing ETH state will allow for a much smaller disk footprint of 1.2 TB for archive nodes and 430 GB for pruned ones.
Other differences include various performance improvements that allow Erigon to run on hard disk drives and crash resistance that prevents damage to Erigon’s database in the event of a forced shutdown.