Anoma R&D Updates: September 2022
The work going on behind the scenes at Anoma is truly groundbreaking, and we like to take the opportunity each month to reflect on what we’ve been doing, and to share it with our community — and September was an especially busy month!
Here’s what we’ve been up to:
Unbonding mechanism refinement, slashing and staking reward development, and inflation system implementation
In September, our Engineering team was busy working on updates to the core ledger. These include continuing the development of the PoS system, refinements to the specification for the unbonding mechanism, and further work on slashing and staking rewards. Other core ledger work included:
- MASP development, testing, and integration.
- Designing the fee system.
- Governance fixes and improvements.
In addition to this, engineering worked on implementing the inflation system, and lazy collections for transactions and validity predicates to enable the use of a constant gas factor for working with large collections. Finally, they worked on refactoring the ledger’s API to allow code reuse between transactions, validity predicates (both native and WASM), the base protocol, and read query handlers.
Progress on Taiga, a feasible mechanism for “inter-VP” communication, and overall stabilization
The Cryptography team had a busy month working on Taiga, and made substantial progress on both its implementation and design. The first implementation of Taiga on Halo 2 has proven to work well, and has superior proving performance than previous versions of Taiga. The team also proposed a feasible mechanism for the “inter-VP” communication which allows sophisticated bartering applications.
Overall the design of Taiga is stabilizing, and there is now a new focus on implementing demo applications, such as ZK Sudoku.
Juvix v0.2.5, improvements to the language and compiler, and Lambda-lifting support
In September we released Juvix v0.2.5. We redesigned the Juvix CLI and fixed some syntax issues, among other things.
In particular, the assignment symbol is now used inside lambdas for case splitting, replacing the old “mapsto” unicode symbol. Unicode is still supported but is no longer used in the standard library or the main examples in the Juvix codebase.
Some bugs were also fixed this month, including one related to the termination checker that prevented correctly defining standard recursive functions, such as the Fibonacci number generator.
In the coming weeks and months, we expect greater introspection, meaning the team is spending some time reviewing and understanding the current design of the language and the compiler in order to work on further improvements. In particular, the team continues working on the following long-term projects:
1. Core language and intermediate representation for efficient compilation of functional programs, including:
- Revision and understanding of the design and implementation.
- Lambda-lifting support and modifications of closure formation method.
- Support for let- and letrec blocks to allow mutually recursive definitions.
2. Juvix ASM, a low-level stack-based language, including interpreter, evaluator, and tests.
Improvements to Namada
In September, our Infrastructure and Dev-X team were largely focused on Namada. This included improving and fixing the Namada CI, adding a small utility to the Namada CI to send random transactions to a set of nodes, which is especially useful for testing. They also improved the Namada set of docker images, and worked on enhancing the trusted setup infrastructure in preparation for the release.
Onwards!
In October, we will be in Bogota for Schelling Point and DevCon. Be sure to come and say hello if you’re going to be there, too, we love nothing more than meeting members of our community IRL — and we can share an Aguardiente or two.
Our R&D teams will continue with preparations or 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, on Discord, and through our newsletter.
