Anoma R&D Updates: July 2022
July was another busy month for the Anoma R&D teams. From making essential core ledger improvements, to developing new prototype elliptic curves for the Veri-zexe scheme, to formalizing Narwhal and Heterogeneous Paxos, it’s safe to say that there is never a dull moment at the cutting edge of advanced cryptography and protocol development.
Here’s an overview of what we’ve been working on in the last month:
Core ledger improvements, Ethereum oracle integration, and IBC proof consistency
In July our Engineering team finished integrating an Ethereum oracle into the ledger, designed the protocol for including events from Ethereum on chain, and began implementing designs to support this.
They also made a pull request to ICS23 to make proof verification APIs more consistent, which has been approved. When this is released, it will obviate the need for adjustments in our storage.
Finally, the engineering team have been working on, improving, and testing the multi-asset shielded pool (MASP) integration, including adding support for transaction history queries, and refactoring PoS, adding secp256k1 support, and various bug fixes. They also released Anoma v0.6.1.
Taiga implementation, new prototype elliptic curves, and the validity predicate interface for Vamp-IR
Our cryptography team has made a number of important developments in the last month. Firstly, they experimented with the initial Taiga implementation, including several example private Validity Predicates, and different Plonk-based proving systems, as well as adopting the Veri-zexe design as Taiga’s underlying decentralized private computation scheme.
They also developed new prototype elliptic curves which are more efficient for the Veri-zexe scheme using Poseidon hash. With the cryptographic schemes for Taiga still being established, the team is now focusing on completing the initial implementation, developing the validity predicate interface for Vamp-IR and compiler backends, and developing more example validity predicates for bartering.
Broader support for C language backend, revisions type-checking algorithms, and new static analysis in the compiler pipeline
The current version, v0.2.2, had just been released on July 26th, which incorporated broader support for the C language backend and a couple of optimizations to produce more efficient C code, along with revisions to the type-checking algorithm for type aliases and holes in type signatures and data constructor declarations.
In addition, a new static analysis now runs in the compiler pipeline to prevent declaring non-strictly positive inductive data types for safety purposes. As always, the latest version contained bug fixes, e.g., for pattern parentheses and curly braces in the nested patterns. The whole changelog of v0.2.2 is available on GitHub.
The next version, v0.2.3, planned for the second week of August, will bring WASM compilation of validity predicates to be executed in Anoma for the first time, warnings for pattern matching, and a documentation tool for Juvix programs, with a couple of refactors to the codebase.
Formalizing Narwhal and Heterogeneous Paxos, and outreach in the community
The team behind Typhon continues work on formalizing Narwhal and Heterogeneous Paxos, however, July was primarily a month of outreach in the community.
At Nebular Summit, we presented Typhon and introduced Chimera Chains, and met potential Narwhal collaborators. At PODC, we discussed with colleagues at Dfinity, Algorand, VMWare, and a variety of universities from around the world.
Reworking the Namada/Anoma CI and improvements to our internal tooling
This month, the Infrastructure/Dev-X team focussed on reworking the Namada/Anoma CI, using github actions and dropping Drone.
In addition to this, they were also focussed improving our internal tooling, specifically:
- A Grafana monitoring dashboard,
- A Devnet RPC SSL proxy, and
- Devnet spawning.
What’s next?
In the coming weeks, we will be in Seoul for BUIDL Asia and ETH Seoul, so please do look out for them and be sure to say hello! Our R&D teams will continue with preparations for the launch of the Namada trusted setup. You can register to join the trusted setup here.
And as always, stay tuned for everything Anoma on Twitter and through our newsletter.
