WeaveVM Alphanet V2

Learn more about Alphanet v2 technical architecture

WeaveVM Alphanet V2 succeeds V1 as our next network upgrade. V1 was sunsetted after 3 months, logging 67k+ users, 2M transactions, and supporting 4 L2s for ledger archiving needs.

WeaveVM Alphanet V2 Architecture

Technical Architecture

WeaveVM Alphanet V2 Differences From V1

Same RPCs and endpoints, but a fresh new state

Alphanet V2 have a fresh state (memory, accounts, deployments, history, etc.) but is maintain the same V1 endpoints throughout the migration – any integrations that worked with the V1 RPC will carry over to V2 with no changes required.

5.6x Higher Data Throughput, And Faster Finality

In V1, Alphanet had a 2s block time and ran at 150 mgas/s (9.375 MBps data throughput). With the V2 release, we’ve made several improvements:

• Block time has decreased from 2s to 1s

• Gas per non-zero byte has been reduced from 16 to 8

• Block gas limit has been increased from 300M to 500M

As a result, Alphanet V2 is run at 500 mgas/s (~62 MBps data throughput) and achieve faster finality.

Data-Centric Changes at the Smart Contracts Level

As a data-centric EVM rollup, we have doubled the contract size defined in EIP-170 (24576 bytes in EIP-170), lifting the max limit for dApp developers to deploy larger singleton smart contracts for complex on-chain activities.

Introducing WeaveVM Gaseconomics: The First Arweave-EVM Gaseconomics

Gaseconomics of an EVM chain often require modification when that EVM network is a rollup and needs to settle data on a L1. Until now, most EVM rollups have settled data on Ethereum, using widely adopted gaseconomics practices. However, as the first EVM rollup to use Arweave for main and only data settlement, we had to build new gaseconomics that use the Arweave network for data settlement and take into account the price of Arweave storage.

This change makes WeaveVM fully independent from Arweave’s 100kb free transaction subsidy that’s being provided for now by organizations within the Arweave ecosystem. It allows the network to operate at any data limit and puts proper economics in place where users pay for the data that their actions on WeaveVM generate on Arweave. Check out the code implementation here and here.

In simple terms, this iteration of the gaseconomics design in Alphanet V2 defines a new EVM base fee, increasing it from 21,000 to 500,000 gas. This gas change resulted from careful calculations factoring in Arweave’s base winston fee, which remains constant for any data ranging from 1 byte to 256 KB. This new minimum base fee of 500,000 gas also introduces a new constant called LPGP (Lowest Possible Gas Price), set at 640,000,000 wei/gas (0.64 gwei/gas), indicating the new minimum gas price on Alphanet V2.

With this new gaseconomics design, and because WeaveVM Alphanet’s transaction size limit is lower than 256 KB (128 KB on WeaveVM), any transaction on Alphanet V2 will have enough gas paid by the transaction sender to cover data settlement fees on Arweave.

To learn more about Alphanet V2, read the release blog post.