Discussion: Typhon's Chimera Chains

Comparative Architecture
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chimera_cat_abstract_web
We recently published a blog post on Chimera Chains, a feature of Anoma’s Typhon ordering and execution engine.

Chimera Chains generalize shared sequencers. They use a consensus based on Heterogeneous Paxos to simplify cross-blockchain atomic transactions for chains with overlapping trust models.

This forum post is for discussion of the blog post.

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good news, it’s very helpful

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@isheff Posted a thread on that X thing here

Curious on your thoughts with the analogy to routers.

Is this a good enough framework? Any better analogies or comps you think would be a better way of looking at it?

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I responded on X / Twitter, with a couple of comments:

  • Transactions committed to the chimera chain are final. They do not then have to “make it to the base chain.” However, chimera chains have a different notion of “committed” for each base chain. The atomicity guarantee is the guarantee that the base chains’ “commits” agree.
  • I’m not sure about the router analogy. Chimera chains are for atomic cross-chain transactions. “Traditional” analogues are atomic cross-database transactions, which are also hard. Asynchronous messaging between chains feels a lot more like routing, and can be done with IBC.
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