The IBD Process

Synchronizing a new node to the network tip involves several distinct stages:

Peer discovery and chain selection where the node connects to random peers and determines the most-work chain. Header download when block headers are fetched and connected to form the full header chain. Block download when the node requests blocks belonging to that chain from multiple peers simultaneously. Block and transaction validation where each block’s transactions are verified before the next one is processed.

While block validation itself is inherently sequential, each block depends on the state produced by the previous one, much of the surrounding work runs in parallel. Header…

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