Explainer

PulseVM, in short

What PulseVM is, what is known, and what is not. Read from the published code and the official sites.

What it is

PulseVM is Metallicus's engine for running XPR-style contracts on Metal Blockchain. It is described as built for payments and banking.

What is known

• No cutover date has been announced, and there is no official plan for one.
• pulse-cutover, a repository by paulgnz on GitHub, calls itself a community proposal, not an official plan.
• Block producer applications on XPR Network are paused "while the network completes its transition to PulseVM" (xprnetwork.org, 23 September).
• The XPR-style web API (pull request #98) was written by Blas Rodriguez Irizar and merged on 23 September.

How it makes blocks, from the code

• Who builds each block is drawn by stake, block by block. There is no public schedule.
• Blocks are made only when transactions are waiting.
• A block can't be stamped before its time.
• A buy sent too early is accepted into the queue, then dropped. The sender carries a small charge on that node, which fades.
• The reply to a sent transaction is only its id.

From the published pulsevm code, release v1.0.0. Checked again on 2 October: later changes fix a timestamp format and update testing; none of them change how blocks are made.

What is not known

• Finality of "about a second" is the claim on pulsevm.dev. The rehearsal saw a stall of about 50 seconds.
• Nothing has been measured on a live PulseVM network yet. We will say what we measure when there is one.