Blazil: The Engine Behind Feedable Network
Every Feedable miner runs Blazil. Not as a sidecar, not as a remote service, but co-located on the same machine, communicating through shared memory. Understanding Blazil is understanding why Proof of Feed is possible.
The throughput number
233,894 TPS is a measured result from internal benchmarks running on production-class hardware. It is not a theoretical maximum. It is what Blazil sustains under load on a real machine with real data.
The number matters for the protocol. The higher Blazil's throughput, the more inference jobs a miner can process per block, the higher the block rewards, the stronger the economic incentive to run a node. The engine throughput is the foundation of the entire economic model.
How Blazil achieves this
The architecture is a chain of components, each designed to minimize latency and maximize throughput.
io_uring for I/O. Blazil uses Linux io_uring for all disk and network operations. io_uring is a shared ring buffer between userspace and the kernel. System calls are batched and submitted asynchronously, which eliminates the per-operation context switch overhead that limits conventional I/O.
LMAX Disruptor as the ring buffer. The Disruptor is a high-performance inter-thread messaging library originally developed for financial trading systems. It uses a lock-free ring buffer with mechanical sympathy — the data structure is designed to avoid false sharing on CPU cache lines. Events are published and consumed in sequence, with no contention and no garbage.
Tract ONNX runtime. Tract is a Rust ONNX inference engine. It compiles model operations into native code at startup, trades dynamic dispatch for static dispatch, and produces inference output with minimal overhead. Blazil feeds data chunks through Tract and collects the result.
TigerBeetle VSR for commits. The final step is committing a TransferId to TigerBeetle. TigerBeetle uses the Viewstamped Replication Revisited protocol for consensus, which provides deterministic finality without the overhead of general-purpose consensus protocols. A commit is a single network round trip to the TigerBeetle cluster.
Aeron IPC for the miner bridge. Blazil and the Feedable miner communicate via Aeron IPC. Aeron uses memory-mapped files on /dev/shm for zero-copy message passing between processes on the same machine. The latency is measured in microseconds.
Why co-location matters
A common question is why Blazil must run on the same machine as the miner, rather than being accessible over a network. The answer has two parts.
First, the TransferId commitment proves that inference happened on a specific TigerBeetle cluster. If Blazil were remote, a miner could point to a Blazil cluster they do not control, and the proof would not be attributable to them.
Second, co-location with Aeron IPC eliminates network latency from the proof generation path. Miners are racing to produce valid blocks before the 10-second block time. Every millisecond of latency in the proof pipeline is a competitive disadvantage. Co-location makes the protocol fair.
What this means for miners
Running a miner node means running Blazil. The hardware requirement is not negotiable: NVMe storage, 16 or more vCPU, 128GB RAM. This is AWS i4i.4xlarge class hardware.
The requirement exists because Blazil needs it to achieve the throughput that makes the economic model work. A miner running Blazil on underpowered hardware will produce fewer valid proofs per block and earn proportionally less.
The validator path is lighter. Validators do not run Blazil. They verify FeedProofs by querying TigerBeetle, which requires 4 vCPU and 16GB RAM on any VPS.
The open source path
Blazil is developed by the same team that built Feedable Network. The inference engine and the blockchain are designed together, not bolted together. The integration between Blazil's TigerBeetle cluster and the Feedable miner is specified in the protocol, not an afterthought.
The source code for the miner, including the Aeron IPC bridge in fc-aeron, is open at github.com/feedable-network-lab/feedable-blockchain-coin.