Ten-Year Fiber - Inside a Corner of Nervos
This piece is from my personal blog and does not represent any organization.
“Fiber is a Ten-Year Plan.”
I sat in my chair, staring at the ceiling. The only light in the room came from the white glow spilling from the computer screen, flickering in sync with the voice speaking from the other end of the network.
“We are a small team, and we need to dedicate our full effort to getting one thing done.”
The participants had squeezed the scroll bar into a tiny sliver. A column of crossed-out microphone icons lined up beside their names, their gaze fixed on the sole voice. Behind those circular masks I couldn’t see through, were the others pondering this weighty information? Were they burying their heads, organizing their thoughts with pen and paper? Or were they just listening to the audio in their headphones while doing something else?
Back to April 2022. I had just raised enough money for my surgery. Looking back from now, that was obviously the most important turning point of my past life. But at the time, a massive reality stood before me:
How do I pay the deposit to a hospital located overseas?
The pandemic was raging. Although social order hadn’t collapsed, invisible walls had been erected everywhere. After being turned away by several banks near my place, I was told that the bank named after the country might be able to process my request.
The security guard at the entrance raised his thermometer gun and pulled the trigger at my forehead.
“Beep.”
The screen lit up green, signifying safety. He waved his hand, allowing the “compliant product” to pass. A sharp buzz soon pierced my ears, urging me to sit before the glass window.
“What business do you need to handle?”
The teller’s eyes were glued to the screen, mechanically demanding my identity, demanding my intent, demanding proof of the recipient. No matter how many times I tried, when explaining my life decisions to others, my throat would occasionally catch on the words I was trying to spit out.
The sound of typing, the rustling of paper, and the voice asking a supervisor for instructions followed, until the teller’s final verdict floated through the knuckle-thick bulletproof glass:
“Sorry, we can’t handle this.”
Since then, the fiat currency in my perception was reduced to exchange vouchers that could expire at any moment, no longer able to bear the weight of the word “asset”. It wasn’t until two years later that I found the alternative this world had prepared for fiat.
It was a dinner after a conference. The bar was playing the jazz I liked. I ordered a beer and squeezed into a table for two. The chair was tall, with rails between the four legs, letting me prop up my feet that couldn’t reach the ground.
“What is Nervos?” People at the exhibition always asked this, just like the person before. I followed muscle memory, speaking sentences that were merely summaries of the flyer. Their eyes would stop at the flyer anyway, trying to explain cryptocurrency using their understanding of stocks.
Fortunately, the face sitting opposite me now wasn’t one of indifferent unconcern, but the lead of the wallet team. Probably for health reasons, he, like most people in the ecosystem, kept his distance from alcohol. However, the lack of alcohol didn’t stop him from being a talkative person — so much so that he occasionally over-shared on social media, stirring up controversy in the community.
He was aware of how outsiders viewed him and mocked himself a bit, drawing a burst of laughter from us. However, judging by what he shared, the investors’ opinion of him didn’t seem to be affected.
“They’ll know once they try it.” his tone was like someone explaining a natural phenomenon: “The reason why we want to build a payment network.” He turned to me: “You should try it too.”
Warm yellow light shone on his face. He stared at me, his lips and eyebrows urging me to pick up my phone. After surviving a grueling day, I naturally had no reason to refuse his enthusiastic request. I was just curious how he could still show such rich expressions after repeating the same sentence over and over. I opened the newly downloaded wallet, held the phone in my hand, QR code facing up, and handed it parallel to the table in front of him.
What should I do next? Before I could react, the green checkmark of a successful receipt was already displayed on my screen.
“So cryptocurrency can actually have an experience like this” — the thought washed over my brain. In that moment, the warm yellow light, the jazz melody, even the face across from me became a blur. Only this green symbol remained in my field of vision, appearing to mock the version of me that had once hit a wall at the bank. This sense of awe could probably only be compared to the moment humans first saw paper money turn into electronic signals.
When I came back to my senses, he was very satisfied with my reaction, the smile on his face growing even more distinct.
Fiber, a payment network built on CKB, entered the testing phase not long after. “To lower the barrier for developers, Fiber needs an SDK.” In the weekly sync meeting, my colleagues and I shared this decision.
“Great, this is absolutely necessary. This is the only way developers can use Fiber to build things.” There was no scroll bar, but the microphone icons flickered in turn.
For programmers who have worked for years, wrapping an SDK is usually tedious work. Following the documentation to encase definitions in code one by one — you could patch together a passable empty shell without even taking your eyes off a playing video window.
Over the past five years, in the wasteland of CKB, who knows how many developers entrusted their sincerity and passion to those cheap cloth bags so thin they were translucent, only to hear a rip, sending everything crashing to the ground, covered in mud. Until we started from scratch, stitching a new SDK for CKB, thread by thread.
I stared at those hexadecimal characters, feeling dizzy, the screen before me shrouded in mist. Carefully calculating the length, reserving enough CKB to accommodate the data; checking existing denominations one by one until there was enough input; stuffing the change back into the output, and remembering to calculate the transaction fee for the new data.
“A transfers 100 CKB to B” — such a simple thing, yet I had to be like a penny-pinching accountant, piecing together the transaction step by step in the low-level code.
The error code never told me why. It just coldly changed from -12 to -11, its mocking face never softening. I stared with bloodshot eyes, reading historical code in the repository from years ago, trying to figure out why it worked back then.
Could we prevent Fiber from repeating CKB’s mistakes?
Fiber wasn’t a tough yarn. It was more like tangled silk. Most of the time, the threads were knotted together, and we often couldn’t tell which loose end corresponded to which. We had to hold our breath and lean in close, observing the flow of the data. Only after sorting them out one by one could we spin the fibers into yarn and weave them into cloth.
That was a long three months.
We were like a cracked mirror, kneading various things into the same plane: meetings with behemoths, infrastructure needing completion on to-do lists; ideas brought into reality, curious people at events; and cold data charts, analyzing the reasons why people stayed in the community.
And 194.
Number 194. This was the Pull Request for the Fiber SDK code.
With every attempt to fix a problem, the test cases would run once, until the errors disappeared completely. To help developers understand the concept of channels, the simple webpage laid out not just parameters and components, but also our understanding of the interaction flow.
We were far from completely finishing development, but we had a good start. The moment of code merge was waving at us. Or so it should have been.
“The development of the Fiber SDK is not under our jurisdiction. Another team will take over from here.” The conclusion wasn’t long, but surprisingly powerful, snapping the connected threads.
I didn’t ask why. In the chat app’s text box, the cursor blinked, staring at us — a group of tech guys who moved ourselves to tears every day.
Okay, I didn’t actually like writing code that much.
I was just used to finishing things I started. Programmers always switch their editors to dark mode to make the screen less glaring. But that doesn’t stop the light from entering the eyeballs, blinding one to the day and night outside the window.
I stood up. My back, sore from sitting for so long, was aching more easily these days.
Fiber’s progress wouldn’t stagnate because of our absence. In the weekly cross-team meetings, I could still hear the wallet team asking about the issues they encountered.
“Can Fiber nodes run in the browser now?” The wallet ran on the web, so naturally, they would ask this.
“Not yet.” It sounded like the Fiber team wasn’t as well-staffed as imagined.
However, this didn’t become an obstacle. A few weeks later, a solution where servers hosted nodes on behalf of users successfully ran on the testnet.
Later still, that wallet team was disbanded. The official announcement was brief and indifferent, detonating in the community as expected. But he, who was once so talkative, never replied again. That phone that was once on the high chair, at the table for two, never lit up with Fiber’s green checkmark to this day.
Fiber’s progress wouldn’t stagnate because of their absence either. The good news is, Fiber nodes can finally run in the browser now.
“Well, let’s stop here for today.”
The voice cut off. I sent the meeting minutes to the group as routine, drawing the curtain on this one-man show that no longer had an audience.
Because the computer hadn’t been touched for a long time, the screen dimmed automatically until it went out. The light source withered, and the room’s ceiling plunged into total darkness.
The mountain path was narrow, only wide enough for my colleague and me to walk single file. The falling leaves crunched beneath our feet. We talked about daily life, about future plans, and finally, we talked about the big and small matters of the ecosystem.
“Isn’t Fiber a ten-year plan?” I said: “How come there’s not much movement after just persisting for a year?”
His voice was the same as always, steady with a hint of sly playfulness. He didn’t think much:
“Precisely because of that, it is a plan that needs ten years.”
Ten years from now, will that green checkmark really light up?