Anoma ETHCC Round-up: Day One
Welcome to the first day of the Anoma ETHCC Round-up!
Each day this week we’ll be giving an overview of all the great stuff we’re participating in while we’re in Paris, so that you don’t miss the highlights from the team.
An architecture for user-defined markets
To kick things off, co-founder
gave a talk titled, ‘An architecture for user-defined markets’.Starting with a journey through the evolution of protocols — from Bitcoin (scriptable settlement) , to Ethereum (programmable settlement), to the present day, Awa explained that “the issue with modern applications that are built only with programmable settlement, is that they actually have more requirements that settlements cannot satisfy. […] In the protocol design, they will have one component that is centralized, or is a web2 component.”
This brought us on to Anoma — and Awa dove into the architecture, and how it aims to solve the trade-offs of existing approaches. Anoma is a unified architecture which allows you to build full-stack, decentralized applications. It is intent-centric, meaning that it has an inherent focus on what the user wants to achieve, and it is innately privacy-preserving.
The latter is achieved through a unique, single execution environment which can handle transparent, shielded, and privacy states. All three privacy guarantees can be leveraged in one application if built using the Anoma architecture.
Anoma enables counterparty discovery from the outset, and allows atomic, multi-chain settlement without the need to move through a bridge to a single security domain. Awa explained that while the team is building an instantiation that is Layer 1, “there are multiple deployment models for Anoma. You can deploy it yourself — we call it fractal scaling, as a sovereign chain and a community operated chain, so you have all the architecture there, but you get to customize everything around the token, the governance and security model.”
She concluded with a reminder that many design flaws and exploitative paradigms are being carried over from Web2 into Web3, and the importance — when designing decentralized protocols — of enabling “a more equitable relationship between the user and the system. And if there is room for a few parties to extract a disproportionate amount of value, given the little value that they give back to the process, then this needs to be eliminated.”
Ultimately, this is part of the motivation to pursue an intent-centric architecture with Anoma — “because as long as an intent has been described as user wants, then the system will not add additional informational externalities.”
Watch Awa’s full talk below:
Christopher — “Blockchain Security/Privacy: don’t keep it too simple!”
Co-founder, Christopher Goes, gave his talk titled ‘Blockchain security/privacy: Don’t keep it simple!’
His talk began with an overview of why privacy is important, quipping that “it’s kind of odd that we need to be making arguments for privacy, because for all of human history privacy has been the default… It’s only digital systems that have changed this equilibrium.”
Christopher explained that without privacy, there is no substrate for protecting individual rights, and in this case it is instead left up to benevolence — not only of what a government decides, but what everyone else decides, too.
He went on to explain the state of privacy in blockchains — which is essentially broken into two broad choices, each with their own unique trade-offs. If users want privacy, the first choice is a sovereign blockchain that issues its own assets, like Zcash. This is effective, however the inflexibility of the tokens makes it difficult for them to be widely adopted. For example, very few of us will be using ZEC to buy a latte any time soon.
The second choice people have when it comes to privacy on blockchain is to use a privacy-preserving solution built on a smart contract chain. These are more flexible when it comes to the assets that can be used, however they are usually much more costly.
Christopher then arrived at our solution for this, which is called Namada — “which aims to synthesize across the trade-offs of existing solutions.”
A key component of Namada is the multi-asset shielded pool (MASP) which extends the Sapling circuit to be asset agnostic. A feature of the MASP is that it’s privacy additive. You could be using any number of assets in a single shielded pool. As such, privacy is a public good — you can use the shielded pool to gain privacy for your transaction, but by doing so, you also contribute to the privacy of everyone who is using the shielded pool.
What’s more, if you look at many proof-of-stake networks currently, you will observe a concerning power law in state distributions — in fact, proof-of-stake is centralizing.
Namada overcomes this by using something called cubic slashing. Cubic slashing punishes correlated faults — because the more correlated faults are, the more risks there are to the safety of the network.
Watch Christopher’s full talk below:
Privacy Evolution: A sneak peak for tomorrow
Tomorrow from 4pm ’til late we will be co-hosting ‘Privacy Evolution’ along with
. This event will bring together the best and brightest from the zero-knowledge community, as we join to learn about ZKPs and the future of individual privacy in Web3 — and enjoy some drinks and pizza. There will also be an exclusive afterparty, hosted by our friends at .Come and say hello!
Finally, if you’re in Paris for ETHCC, come and say hello at our booth at on the 3rd floor in the ‘Chill Room.’ We’d love to meet you, to answer any questions you might have, and to share some merch, too!
Finally — as always — be sure to follow Anoma and Namada on Twitter, and join us on Discord, for updates as they happen!
