Whitechain

To ensure compatibility with existing technology and to leverage the benefits of a popular community, Whitechain has chosen to remain compatible with all existing smart contracts on Ethereum and Ethereum tooling. This has been achieved by developing based on a go-ethereum fork, as the team holds high respect for the excellent work of Ethereum:

Whitechain has rolled out a new EVM-compatible network utilizing Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus to enable shorter block times and reduced fees. As its development is based on go-ethereum fork, you may observe that many toolings, binaries, and documentation are based on Ethereum.

PoA consensus

Proof-of-Authority (PoA) consensus is an efficient consensus algorithm that was coined by Gavin Wood, a co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain in 2017. In a PoA consensus, all nodes are pre-authenticated, which allows using consensus types that provide a high transaction rate in addition to other benefits.

Advantages of PoA consensus

Compared to other consensus types that require proof of spent computational resources (Proof-of-Work) or an existing "share" (Proof-of-Stake), PoA consensus has several notable advantages:

• It does not require high-performance hardware like PoW consensus, which demands nodes to spend computational resources for solving complex mathematical tasks
• The interval of time at which new blocks are generated is predictable. For PoW and PoS consensuses, this time varies
• Blocks are generated in a sequence at appointed time intervals by authorized network nodes, leading to a higher transaction rate
• PoA consensus is tolerant to compromised and malicious nodes, as long as 51% of nodes are not compromised

How PoA consensus works in Whitechain

In Whitechain, only selected nodes known as validators (validating nodes) can generate new blocks. These nodes are responsible for maintaining the blockchain network and the distributed ledger. The blockchain registry maintains the list of validators, and the order of nodes in this list determines the sequence in which nodes generate new blocks.

Quickstart with Docker

Prerequisites

Ensure you have Docker installed (get it from https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/) and a compatible operating system (Windows, macOS, or Linux).

Start a full node

Open a terminal or command prompt, then enter:

docker run --rm -it \
  --name wbt -v /Users/alice/wbt:/root \
  -p 8545:8545 -p 30303:30303 \
  whitebit/wbt:v1.1.0 --wbt-mainnet

This will start geth in snap-sync mode with a DB memory allowance of 1GB just as the above command does. It will also create a persistent volume in your home directory for saving your blockchain as well as map the default ports.

Do not forget --http.addr 0.0.0.0, if you want to access RPC from other containers and/or hosts. By default, geth binds to the local interface and RPC endpoints are not accessible from the outside.

Monitor logs

If you want to run Whitechain testnet node, you need to start geth with --wbt-testnet instead of --wbt-mainnet.

Monitor logs

You can check if your node has started syncing by looking for the following log messages:

INFO [08-04|12:00:00.000] Block synchronisation started 
INFO [08-04|12:00:00.001] Syncing: state download in progress      synced=6.25% state=302.12KiB accounts=1282@302.12KiB slots=0@0.00B codes=0@0.00B eta=17.148s
INFO [08-04|12:00:00.002] Syncing: chain download in progress      synced=0.01% chain=18.00B headers=1536@6.00B bodies=4@6.00B receipts=4@6.00B eta=1h49m39.978s

Building the source

For prerequisites and detailed build instructions please read the geth Installation Instructions.

Building geth requires both a Go (version 1.18 or later) and a C compiler. You can install them using your favourite package manager. Once the dependencies are installed, run

make geth

or, to build the full suite of utilities:

make all

Executables

The Whitechain project comes with several wrappers/executables found in the cmd directory.

Command	Description
geth	Our main Ethereum CLI client. It is the entry point into the Ethereum network (main-, test- or private net), capable of running as a full node (default), archive node (retaining all historical state) or a light node (retrieving data live). It can be used by other processes as a gateway into the Ethereum network via JSON RPC endpoints exposed on top of HTTP, WebSocket and/or IPC transports. geth --help and the CLI page for command line options.
clef	Stand-alone signing tool, which can be used as a backend signer for geth.
devp2p	Utilities to interact with nodes on the networking layer, without running a full blockchain.
abigen	Source code generator to convert Ethereum contract definitions into easy to use, compile-time type-safe Go packages. It operates on plain Ethereum contract ABIs with expanded functionality if the contract bytecode is also available. However, it also accepts Solidity source files, making development much more streamlined. Please see our Native DApps page for details.
bootnode	Stripped down version of our Ethereum client implementation that only takes part in the network node discovery protocol, but does not run any of the higher level application protocols. It can be used as a lightweight bootstrap node to aid in finding peers in private networks.
evm	Developer utility version of the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) that is capable of running bytecode snippets within a configurable environment and execution mode. Its purpose is to allow isolated, fine-grained debugging of EVM opcodes (e.g. evm --code 60ff60ff --debug run).
rlpdump	Developer utility tool to convert binary RLP (Recursive Length Prefix) dumps (data encoding used by the Ethereum protocol both network as well as consensus wise) to user-friendlier hierarchical representation (e.g. rlpdump --hex CE0183FFFFFFC4C304050583616263).
puppeth	a CLI wizard that aids in creating a new Ethereum network.

Running geth

Going through all the possible command line flags is out of scope here (please consult our CLI Wiki page), but we've enumerated a few common parameter combos to get you up to speed quickly on how you can run your own geth instance.

Hardware Requirements

Minimum:

CPU with 2+ cores 8GB RAM 100GB free storage space to sync the blockchain 8 MBit/sec download Internet service

Recommended: Fast CPU with 4+ cores 16GB+ RAM High-performance SSD with at least 500GB of free space 25+ MBit/sec download Internet service

Configuration

As an alternative to passing the numerous flags to the geth binary, you can also pass a configuration file via:

$ geth --wbt-mainnet --config /path/to/your_config.toml

To get an idea how the file should look like you can use the dumpconfig subcommand to export your existing configuration:

$ geth --wbt-mainnet --your-favourite-flags dumpconfig

Programmatically interfacing geth nodes

As a developer, sooner rather than later you'll want to start interacting with geth and the Ethereum network via your own programs and not manually through the console. To aid this, geth has built-in support for a JSON-RPC based APIs (standard APIs and geth specific APIs). These can be exposed via HTTP, WebSockets and IPC (UNIX sockets on UNIX based platforms, and named pipes on Windows).

The IPC interface is enabled by default and exposes all the APIs supported by geth, whereas the HTTP and WS interfaces need to manually be enabled and only expose a subset of APIs due to security reasons. These can be turned on/off and configured as you'd expect.

HTTP based JSON-RPC API options:

• --http Enable the HTTP-RPC server
• --http.addr HTTP-RPC server listening interface (default: localhost)
• --http.port HTTP-RPC server listening port (default: 8545)
• --http.api API's offered over the HTTP-RPC interface (default: eth,net,web3)
• --http.corsdomain Comma separated list of domains from which to accept cross origin requests (browser enforced)
• --ws Enable the WS-RPC server
• --ws.addr WS-RPC server listening interface (default: localhost)
• --ws.port WS-RPC server listening port (default: 8546)
• --ws.api API's offered over the WS-RPC interface (default: eth,net,web3)
• --ws.origins Origins from which to accept websockets requests
• --ipcdisable Disable the IPC-RPC server
• --ipcapi API's offered over the IPC-RPC interface (default: admin,debug,eth,miner,net,personal,txpool,web3)
• --ipcpath Filename for IPC socket/pipe within the datadir (explicit paths escape it)

You'll need to use your own programming environments' capabilities (libraries, tools, etc) to connect via HTTP, WS or IPC to a geth node configured with the above flags and you'll need to speak JSON-RPC on all transports. You can reuse the same connection for multiple requests!

Note: Please understand the security implications of opening up an HTTP/WS based transport before doing so! Hackers on the internet are actively trying to subvert Ethereum nodes with exposed APIs! Further, all browser tabs can access locally running web servers, so malicious web pages could try to subvert locally available APIs!

Contribution

Thank you for considering to help out with the source code! We welcome contributions from anyone on the internet, and are grateful for even the smallest of fixes!

If you'd like to contribute to Whitechain, please fork, fix, commit and send a pull request for the maintainers to review and merge into the main code base. If you wish to submit more complex changes though, please write us a Github issue!

Please make sure your contributions adhere to our coding guidelines:

• Code must adhere to the official Go formatting guidelines (i.e. uses gofmt).
• Code must be documented adhering to the official Go commentary guidelines.
• Pull requests need to be based on and opened against the master branch.
• Commit messages should be prefixed with the package(s) they modify.
  • E.g. "eth, rpc: make trace configs optional"

Please see the Developers' Guide for more details on configuring your environment, managing project dependencies, and testing procedures.

License

The wbt library (i.e. all code outside of the cmd directory) is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0, also included in our repository in the COPYING.LESSER file.

The wbt binaries (i.e. all code inside of the cmd directory) is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0, also included in our repository in the COPYING file.