PulseVM

Appearance

What is PulseVM? ​

PulseVM is an execution environment for Metal Blockchain delivered as a plugin for its node software (metalgo). It implements the Antelope execution model — the account, permission, and resource system proven over years of production on XPR Network (Antelope 5.0.3) — and runs it as a subnet with modern consensus: sub-second blocks and instant, irreversible finality.

It is the base layer for A-Chain, the future of XPR Network — and equally a kit for any institution or consortium to deploy its own network with its own validators and its own rules.

How it fits together ​

The mental model ​

Think of PulseVM as an operating environment, not "a blockchain you join":

  • Accounts are named (acme.treasury, not 0x7f3a…) and carry hierarchical permission trees.
  • Permissions express real authorization structures: role keys, weighted multisig thresholds, delegation between accounts, instant key rotation.
  • Contracts are WebAssembly, written in TypeScript, Rust, or C++, with typed ABIs and human-readable actions.
  • Resources (CPU, NET, RAM) are staked and provisioned by the operator or institution — end users never buy gas.
  • Finality is instant: the head block is the last irreversible block. There is no reorg case.
  • The rules are yours: account creation policy, fee models, asset-level controls — all live in system contracts the deploying organization owns.

Where it comes from ​

PulseVM stands on two proven foundations, named plainly:

  • Execution: Antelope (formerly EOSIO). The account, permission, contract, and resource semantics are a direct lineage from the Antelope protocol — the model behind XPR Network, WAX, Telos, and EOS. The implementation is pure Rust — modern, memory-safe, and validated byte-for-byte against the reference implementation by replaying full chain histories through both.
  • Consensus: Avalanche's Snowman protocol, as implemented by Metal Blockchain (metalgo). Repeated randomized sampling of the validator set yields fast, metastable, instantly-final agreement — equally suited to small accountable consortium sets and larger public ones.

A Rust node running WebAssembly contracts ​

A detail worth being precise about, because it answers a common question — "Antelope contracts are C++; how do they run on a Rust node?"

Contracts on Antelope chains are never executed as C++. Authors compile their contract — written in C++, Rust, or TypeScript — into a WebAssembly (WASM) binary once, and the chain stores and executes that binary. Any node that (a) runs a WASM engine and (b) serves the same host functions the contract imports will execute it identically. PulseVM does both: a production Rust WASM runtime, plus the full classic Antelope host-function surface. The result: contract binaries from existing Antelope chains run unchanged, byte-identical code hashes and all — while the node underneath is a single modern Rust codebase that builds in about two minutes.

PulseVM is open source (MetalBlockchain/pulsevm), created by Metallicus CTO Glenn Mariën (@MlennGarien).

Where to go next ​