Anoma Research and Development Update: December 2021
December 2021 in review
To wrap up the year, December saw the release of Anoma v0.3.0 that offered a number of improvements and fixes from the previous version. The Feigenbaum testnet released in November was halted following memory issues, as we thank those who participated and gave feedback to the team to incorporate in subsequent versions.
At the same time, further advancements in cryptography was made in private bartering circuits, the distributed key generation (DKG) scheme Ferveo, and the zero knowledge proof protocol Plonkup, which more notably saw a new publication ‘Hash functions in Plonkup’ written by Joshua Fitzgerald. Juvix made impressive progress, among many things creating two proposals, deploying a web tool and integrating Nix.
New version of Anoma and networking-level improvements
Leading up to the release of Anoma v.0.3.0, continuous improvement of the ledger’s performance and stability was made, more specifically in the usage of memory and threads, which was a main cause of the testnet being halted. As always, various bug fixes and improvements were made, one of which was fixing a memory leak affecting Linux. Additionally, toolchains were updated, and storage query proofs were added.
Meanwhile, networking-level improvements continued with work on integrating the inter-blockchain communication protocol (IBC) and DKG. Progress also began on implementing the improved intent gossiper and matchmaker architecture, which in November underwent several developments in design for efficiency purposes.
Private bartering circuits, Plonkup and Ferveo
The conclusion of ZK Hack brought attention to the cryptography behind Anoma, with Joshua Fitzgerald and Joe Bebel interviewed about their experiences as puzzle builders for the event for the Zero Knowledge Podcast. In the background, a private bartering circuit was started for (PBC)-specific work for the Plonk implementation. Within private bartering circuits, experimental VP blinding in-circuit for KZG commitments was implemented, also the creation of a detailed implementation task list for PBC and initial commits to the repository. Detailed specifications were also written for cryptographic primitives, as well as the overall circuit design. Finally, investigation into remaining research questions about VP blinding, recursion and homomorphic encryptions was carried out.
Further work on Ferveo was done in December, that included continued refactor work in cooperation with the engineering team. Initial work on remaining cryptographic tasks also began in hash-to-curve and key committing encryption. Plonkup, the advanced and universal zero-knowledge proof protocol, got heavy spotlight this December, with Joshua Fitzgerald publishing a comprehensive article on the Anoma blog. Additionally, new optimizations for Plonkup were explored, such as permutation polynomial binding. An in-depth investigation was also launched into an Intermediate Representation (IR) that can target Plonkup and other forms of Plonk, as well as R1CS. Alongside this, an in-depth investigation into circuit optimization to accompany IR began.
Juvix
Juvix made a number of advancements to the programming language this December. Firstly, a universe checking proposal was created for the core language, in addition to a proposal to formalize the modules system. The Core AST was serialized into S-expressions, and a web tool was deployed to inspect the compiler. Finally, Nix was integrated and the LLVM backend was further developed.
Look forward to more R&D Updates in 2022!
Anoma is proud to have celebrated and passed a number of milestones this year within different projects that move the vision and ecosystem forward. Don’t forget to read articles from the blog where we cover a range of topics with varying degrees of technical detail. For the promptest updates, follow Anoma on Twitter for the latest publications and happenings, and join community discussions on Discord.
