Following the release of the PARSEC Whitepaper on the 24th May and a decent amount of buzz online, the MaidSafe team are now excited to reveal the release of the code behind PARSEC. As mentioned at the time, we’ve been working round the clock to deliver on the promise of the White Paper and we’re delighted to get to this point of successfully releasing working code after only a few weeks.
The Protocol for Asynchronous, Reliable, Secure and Efficient Consensus is, as far as we’re aware, the world’s first asynchronous, byzantine fault tolerant consensus mechanism and from today you can download it yourself free!
As you’ll know if you’ve been following the evolution of the SAFE Network for any length of time, a commitment to open source software is a fundamental part of our DNA and this release reinforces the point. PARSEC is a key advancement for the the SAFE network but we hope that the benefits from the work that we’ve carried out will travel far beyond the Network alone. Creating consensus and reliably communicating truths are fundamental challenges for all decentralised projects and our hope is that many others will be able to benefit from the work that we’ve carried out and the code that we’re releasing today.
PARSEC allows decentralised networks to reach agreement on a series of events, actions or activities in a secure and reliable manner that is not only highly asynchronous but also Byzantine Fault Tolerant. In other words, the Network is mathematically guaranteed to reach consensus (provided no more than one-third of nodes are malicious or unresponsive for whatever reason). You can now read the whitepaper and download the code directly from GitHub. As always we welcome comment, discussion and collaboration. We are excited to see what more can come from PARSEC.
As a reminder, everything is being released under a GPLv3 Licence (with linking exception)) so there’s nothing to stop you downloading the code. In fact, we’re actively encouraging you to go and do just that. The more the merrier!
For more information check out the Medium post and give it a clap if you like what you see.
@dugcampbell has also created this short video to help give you an overview of PARSEC and the new release.
GitHub has the details on the features already implemented and the ones we’re still working on in the README.md.