Anoma Research & Development Updates: May 2022
May 2022 became a milestone month for Anoma and Heliax, the team building Anoma, as Namada was introduced for the first time. Namada is the first fractal instance of the Anoma protocol, and it enables shielded transfers with any assets with a few second transaction latency and near zero fees.
With the purpose of making privacy-preserving transfers more accessible for end users, Namada is vertically integrated and will be released with user-friendly interfaces in 2022.To find out more about what Namada is, how it works, and how you can use it, and participate in it, check out this article.
In the meantime, both Namada and other components of the Anoma protocol are continuously being upgraded and developed. Here is an overview of what happened this last month.
MASP — Enhancing Privacy Circuits
The multi-asset shielded pool (MASP) is one of the cryptographic components of Anoma, and it allows for users to create transactions with zero-knowledge privacy. The latest software release of Namada deploys the MASP.
Last month, a closed quarters testnet was started with the initial version of MASP and governance. The MASP integration has been improved by adding an incentive scheme and one-shot payments, as well as upgrades around the client and wallet integration.
Ethereum Bridge, Tendermint & Solidity Smart Contract
The Engineering team has also been hard at work with their continuous design, implementation, and testing of the Ethereum bridge. The Ethereum bridge is Anoma’s first custom bridge to enable interoperability with platforms that do not support deterministic finality. Validity predicates have also been implemented for the bridge this month.
Furthermore, a new version of Tendermint ABCI++ has been integrated, while the Solidity smart contract is being designed and implemented.
Taiga Prototype & Vamp-IR Talks
In May, implementation efforts for Taiga have been ramping up significantly. Taiga is a generalized private state transition framework with support for user and application state. It is integrated into the intent gossip and matchmaking layers. A fairly complete prototype, with support for custom private VPs and is expected to be ready soon.
Vamp-IR, a proof system-agnostic intermediate representation that any programming language can target and compile to any circuit backend and constraint system, has also been further developed throughout May. Most significantly, by open-sourcing its code under ZK-Garage, where compiler work continues.
A couple of live presentations on Vamp-IR have also been planned, namely during EthCC and Zcon. If you haven’t yet watched it, check out Joshua Fitzgerald’s presentation on Vamp-IR at Devconnect in Amsterdam in April 2022 below.
Typhon, Heterogeneous Paxos & Narwhal
Over the course of the last month, Typhon has completed a formally verified TLAPS Proof of Safety for a version of Heterogeneous Paxos. This proves in a computer-checkable way that, when correctly implemented, the consensus protocol will not allow users to see conflicting blocks committed to the same (possibly chimera) chain, when trust conditions are met.
We are now proceeding to formalize — and hopefully prove — Liveness as well, ensuring that Heterogeneous Paxos will never “get stuck”, and Typhon will always be able to extend the blockchain.
Typhon is also setting up benchmarking infrastructure to find performance bottlenecks and compare prototypes to existing systems. We have already replicated the performance tests for the original Narwhal, and will build on that infrastructure.
Additionally, Typhon’s specs have been updated to reflect the layered approach, and will soon include a detailed description of Heterogeneous Narwhal, as we work to develop a formal specification in TLA+ for that as well.
MiniJuvix — A Native Programming Language
Also MiniJuvix has seen essential additions to its structure, specifically for writing validity predicates.
Compilation support has been improved and can now compile higher-order functions when using the MiniC backend. Clang has been adopted instead of Emscipten for getting WASM binaries, and the internal error and message handling have been upgraded.
New error messages with Flycheck for the Emacs mode have been added, as well as new and minimalistic documentation with MdBook that matches the design of other Heliax projects.
MiniJuvix is mainly inspired by other functional languages like Agda and Idris. It will compile to different backends but mostly cater to Haskell and Alucard.
Conclusion
Once again, we are very excited to be introducing Namada — and thereby Anoma — to the world. Please follow Namada on Twitter and subscribe to the Namada newsletter on the website for the latest updates.
And as always, stay tuned for everything Anoma on Twitter and through our newsletter.
