I was about to turn in for the night, opening Twitter for one last scroll - what’s the worst that could happen? When I bumped into this post by @neodaoist announcing a 24 hour builder side quest:
🔊 BUILDER SIDE QUEST 🔊 calling all builders — we’re awarding a 2 ETH prize pool for a mobile-friendy web app that showcases the 10x speed improvement of Flashblocks on Base Sepolia: show us the difference between 2s full blocks and 200ms flashblocks, and (bonus) allow a tx to
My interest was piqued, and after clicking around the demo and the docs it was suddenly it was a few hours later, with a small proof of concept before going to bed. My notebook’s record is sparse but on point:
Base + Flashbots have a collab. Live on Sepolia. 200ms blocks. Game of Life?
A throwback to my student biochemistry days, I always liked Conway’s Game of Life. I felt like it could showcase the acceleration of a 10x speedup by comparing the rate of evolution with flasblocks vs. regular blocks.
After a bit more quality time with Cursor the next morning I felt like I had a nice thing going with the Games of Life, even with an option for some fancy patterns in there.
The next question was how to illustrate how much faster it would actually feel as a user? I decided that a splash of colour would help, changing the colour of the relevant game boards when a user’s transaction showed up in a flashblock or block. Would the benefit come across?
I was pretty taken aback by how much faster it felt. When I built my first dapps in 2020, xDai’s 5 second blocks felt plenty fast, and over time I became accustomed or even inured to slow confirmation, because I was always comparing to ETH’s 15 seconds (at the time). But 200ms makes 2 seconds feel like an age, if a transaction lands in one of the first flashbacks. Try it yourself, click “New Color”:
That speedup didn’t happen with a regular stack mind you, leveraging a websocket endpoint to stream flashblocks coming in. This is quite different from the polling-based setup which is predominant in Ethereum apps today. If users are going to benefit from these faster blocks, we might need to build our apps differently - food for thought.
Overall I was pleased with what I shipped, and I was happy that the judges liked it too. A fast turnaround and fun to build, I’ll be taking that feeling of acceleration with me in future.
WINNER (1 ETH): @AZachParkinson for their Game of Life x.com/azacharyf/stat…
fun! #baseflash game-of-flashblocks.vercel.app a game of life at two speeds - change the colour and see how much faster things are with flashblocks
PS: they tagged the wrong AZach, I don’t work for the GOP. Maybe more on what I actually do another time.