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Getting started

This section takes you from "I've heard of Myelin" to "I just ran a CellTx through it and got a CKB-projected report." It assumes nothing about prior CKB knowledge — but if you have worked with CKB before, you can probably skip straight to Anatomy of a Myelin CellTx.

Path through this section

  • Install the toolchain

    Rust toolchain, the myelin-cli workspace, and (optionally) a local CKB devnet for the projection smoke test.

  • First run

    The shortest path to a real CellTx → execution report → CKB projection report JSON on disk.

  • Anatomy of a Myelin CellTx

    What is actually inside a CellTx, why it has both Myelin fields and CKB fields, and what a "projection" really does to it.

Prerequisites at a glance

You will need:

  • A Rust toolchain that matches the workspace Cargo.toml (stable, plus the riscv64imac-unknown-none-elf target if you want to compile CKB scripts locally).
  • Python 3 — used by validation scripts under scripts/.
  • A few gigabytes of free disk for build artefacts and the optional local CKB devnet.
  • Optional: a local CKB devnet (OffCKB or ckb init --testnet) if you want to run the live carrier submission smoke.

The 60-second mental model

Myelin is built on five primitives and one output:

Primitive What it is
Cell A unit of state — capacity, optional data, lock script, optional type script.
CellTx A transition — consumes Cells, creates Cells, carries witnesses and dep references.
CellDAG A static conflict graph the scheduler uses to admit and parallelise CellTxs.
State root The 32-byte commitment to the live Cell set before and after each chunk.
Evidence bundle Everything needed to reconstruct or dispute a chunk — payload, projection, DA, court, settlement.
Output A finalised Myelin block with a committee certificate over the deterministic block hash.

Everything else in this documentation is detail about how these five primitives are produced, ordered, projected, and proven.