monthly roundup

ChainSafe's Monthly Roundup: Issue #1

This year marks a recalibrated ChainSafe that will zero-in once more on the multichain mission that's driven us since inception.

Evan Wells, Ben Adar

Mar 6, 2025 — 4 min read

This year marks a recalibrated ChainSafe that will zero-in once more on the multichain mission that's driven us since inception. We are one of the few multichain research and development firms out there, and we're owning this going into 2025.

Our vision for web3 is a holistic one—a confluence of ecosystems, all working in the open for the propagation of fairer economic systems. ChainSafe expresses this goal through open source public goods, and (naturally) web3 gaming development.

Protocol development

Our mission is to build crypto-economic systems that drive positive change. At ChainSafe, we’re creating the core infrastructure web3 needs to thrive—from alternative clients to libraries, plugins, and developer tools. Below is a check-in on our progress on alternative clients for Polkadot, Filecoin and Ethereum.

Gossamer 🕸️

A Go Implementation of the Polkadot Host

JAM protocol implementation: The team is actively working on JAM State Transition and State Serialization modules for our JAM node according to M1 requirements.

Our team continues to participate in the JAM0 Community Developers calls—a dedicated session for JAM Protocol developers to collaborate and share progress. Watch past JAM0 calls here.

State sync: The team is making great progress on State Sync, which ensures our node stays continuously updated with the latest state after WARP Sync reaches the tip.

Polkadot storage: The team has been focused on integrating previous work on StateDB into the Gossamer node codebase, as well as designing and researching the integration of the GRANDPA finality gadget into the existing Gossamer codebase.

Polkadot parachain protocol implementation: We're dedicating time to design and research around networking-related parachain protocol subsystems, such as the Network Bridge Grid Topology, the Gossip support subsystem, and Authority Discovery.

Forest 🌲

A Filecoin node written in Rust

ChainSafe filecoin services: A consolidated overview of all Filecoin-related projects by ChainSafe is now available at filecoin.chainsafe.io.

Snapshot RPC testing improvements: Enhancements were made to the RPC snapshot testing process, including additional tests and extended coverage to Ethereum RPC methods requiring an index, ensuring consistent functionality across implementations.

Upcoming NV25 upgrade: Preparations are underway for the NV25 "Teep" network upgrade, with more details to be announced soon.

Forest faucet released: The team launched the Forest Faucet, a serverless, open-source tool built with Rust. It allows users to obtain both mainnet and calibnet FIL.

Lodestar ⭐️

An Ethereum consensus client written in Typescript

Pectra retrospective: The team put together their thoughts on the lessons learned from the Pectra Hardfork cycle. They also added their recommendations to help streamline the process, including co-working with teams on Ethereum L1.

Censorship resistance: Lodestar released a blog on censorship resistance in Ethereum, including what it means and why it matters—especially as a core tenant of the web3 ethos that anyone can participate equally without discrimination (as long as they follow protocol rules).

Supporting the Holešky fork: As the Holešky fork ran into configuration issues on 3 of the majority clients, minority clients like Lodestar stepped up to save the network. We helped identify a bug before it affected others on Holešky, released fixes, and kept nodes and validators online as the chain head became increasingly difficult to sync during a long period of non-finality.

Lodestar version updates: The team released versions 1.26.0 to 1.27.1 this month in preparation for the upcoming fork. The latest version included a hotfix for the issues encountered during the Holešky fork.

Collaborations

ChainSafe’s Infrastructure team is particularly proud to have completed work on 4000 genesis validator keys for the Ephemery network. This Ethereum testnet restarts from genesis every 28 days, so these keys are on regular genesis duty.

Last year, ChainSafe Gaming built several components for web3’s favourite game—Parallel TCG—and continues our collaboration with their team maintaining those systems. If you’re just catching up, our engineers built Parallel’s Sanctuary marketplace and the player guild system, Bonds.

This year, ChainSafe Gaming is looking forward to announcing a new collaboration with a studio that’s got the whole team excited about what AI can do for gaming.