MiniChain

Background and Motivation

In 2025, AOSSIE completed many projects deployed on EVM chains and on Ergo. AOSSIE also has, among its mentors and members, people who have worked at some of the most well-known blockchains.

With this MiniChain idea, AOSSIE wants to move beyond the smart contract layer of blockchains and start contributing to the core of blockchain development, by building from scratch a minimalistic but functional blockchain: MiniChain.

There are are few reasons why this is a good moment to do so and why AOSSIE is a good organization to do it:

Most well-known blockchains are now several years old and have accumulated a lot of technical debt. Simply forking their codebases is not an optimal option for starting a new chain.
MiniChain will be focused on research. Its primary purpose is not to be yet another blockchain trying to be the one blockchain to kill them all, but rather to serve as a clean codebase that can be a benchmark for research of variations of the technology. (We hope that MiniChain will be as valuable for blockchain research as, for instance, MiniSat was valuable for satisfiability and automated reasoning research. MiniSat had less than 600 lines of C++ code.)
MiniChain will be focused on education. By having a clean and small codebase, devs will be able to understand blockchains by looking at the codebase. This is aligned with AOSSIE's educational goals.
The blockchain space is again going through a phase where many new blockchains are being launched. Back in 2017 and 2018, such an expansion period led to many general frameworks for blockchains, such as Scorex and various Hyperledger frameworks. But most of these frameworks suffered from speculative generality and were bloated. They focused on extensibility and configurability. MiniChain has a different philosophy: focus on minimality and, therefore, ease of modification.
Recent advances in networking and crypto libraries for Python make it possible to develop MiniChain in Python. Given that Python is one of the easiest languages to learn and results in usually boilerplate-minimized and easy to read code, implementing MiniChain in Python aligns with MiniChain's educational goal.

Overview of Tasks

Develop a fully functional minimal blockchain in Python, with all the expected components: peer-to-peer networking, consensus, mempool, ledger, ...
Bonus task: add smart contracts to the blockchain.

Candidates are expected to refine these tasks in their GSoC proposals. It is encouraged that you develop an initial prototype during the application phase.

Requirements

Use PyNaCl library for hashing, signing transactions and verifying signatures.
Use Py-libp2p for p2p networking.
Implement Proof-of-Work as the consensus protocol.
Use accounts (instead of UTxO) as the accounting model for the ledger.
Use as few lines of code as possible without compromising readability and understandability.
For the bonus task, make Python itself be the language used for smart contracts, but watch out for security concerns related to executing arbitrary code from untrusted sources.

Resources

Read this book: https://www.marabu.dev/blockchain-foundations.pdf

Mentors

Look for mentors with the role @Contributor-StabilityNexus in our discord servers.
Github: @Zahnentferner; Discord: @b.wp

Communication Channel

Join our Discord servers (https://discord.gg/xnmAPS7zqB and https://discord.gg/fuuWX4AbJt) and discuss this idea in this channel (https://discord.com/channels/995968619034984528/1471163521877410045) of the discord of Stability Nexus.