In December 2024, engineers worked on restarting the Everscale devnet to prepare it for the fast finality consensus testing with the Soft Majority Fault Tolerance (SMFT) protocol, which provides increased performance and security. Currently, the devnet is in active state but there are ongoing jobs on infrastructure to start testing by community. Fast finality was one of the major milestones of the 2024 roadmap.
SMFT is one of the potential solutions for achieving fast finality, alongside the DAG-based Tycho protocol. Before being added to the testnet, SMFT underwent a year of rigorous lab testing to evaluate its stability, resilience to node restarts, and ability to handle isolated validator failures. Now integrated into the devnet, the protocol strives for enhancing security with additional checks of blocks created by workchain validators.
On the Everscale mainnet, SMFT operates in shadow mode, validating collated blocks without interrupting the master block production process. In the coming year, developers plan to update the so-called elector contract, a key smart contract in the masterchain responsible for validator elections. The update will improve contract interactions and introduce a slashing mechanism, which deducts fines from a validator’s stake in response to improper node behavior during block verification.