Ask the CTO: Consensus, validator incentives, transfer of assets, and more.
Community asked, Shyft CTO Chris Forrester answered.
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Q from Telegram: Does anyone have links or material to share regarding the technical aspects of the Shyft Network? I’m specifically looking into the exact functions of the network’s Ring, Bridge and Safe and the layers interact…Regarding consensus, is there a rough timeframe in which you’re planning to switch the network from PoW to Strong Federation?
Another one I might add (potentially for the product team again): Am I correct in understanding that the Shyft Safe is a sidechain of the Shyft Bridge? And therefore, are the data attestations stored on both the Shyft Safe AND the Shyft Bridge, to remove the single point of failure? From the whitepaper I’m unsure whether to classify the Shyft Safe as a separate layer of the network (aside Ring and Bridge) or as ‘part’ of the Shyft Bridge?
It’d also be great to get a clarification on the Shyft Ring validator incentive scheme: “participants are incentivized depending on the workload distribution necessary for optimal efficiency of the Shyft Network” (p12). Does this imply that the number of Uncles receiving “rewards on a granular depreciating basis” (p7) is adjusted relatively to network exhaustion/capacity?
Is the Shyft network (as a vertical slice of the whole) already deployed in a test-net framework or something comparable? Or is this the next step which we will see as a product of the partnership with the Government of Bermuda?
A from Shyft CTO: Hi everyone :) Chris Forrester, CTO of Shyft here. In response to the technical questions from @butzemann;
- Shyft Safe can be best imagined as a recommended method of maintaining on-chain assets with built-in failsafes.
- We’re not interested in creating roll-back mechanisms for the main chain due to any one (or subset) of individual(s) balances and/or private keys being stolen.
- Shyft Safe is a way to programmatically enable individuals to retain their curation over their own assets. It’s the recommended way to store your assets on the shyft blockchain.
At its core, there’s a time-locking mechanism with a user-controlled withdrawal redirection based on multi-signature technology.
What this means to the user is that, by default, the amount of assets that are within the user’s “Safe” are approximately 90%. This can be unlocked given a default one-day period where the user sends a message signed by another private key that has its respective public key associated to the user’s administration details.
Within this time period, another presigned message can be sent from a “killswitch” key, again controlled by the same user. Once triggered, the funds in the user’s “Safe” are locked in place, and another set of keys must be used in a multisignature manner within a time period of 6 months.
Thus, any request to transfer assets can be monitored, interrupted if necessary, and recovered with a sequence that doesn’t need to be kept by the user; the multi-signature keys could be controlled by the user’s friend, brother, grandmother, attorney, and a professional escrow service, for example in a 3-out-of-5 multi-signature distribution scheme.
The same locking mechanism that Shyft Safe uses is also applied to transfers of assets to other blockchains via the Shyft Bridge.
In this case, the user gives permission to the Shyft Bridge to:
- Timelock assets on the source chain
- Send a specifically formed message to the destination chain consisting of a Merkle tree proof of asset availability and intent to transfer
- Set a timeout on the destination chain based on number of blocks confirmation of the destination chain to process the Merkle tree proof without having a chain reorganization occur.
Hence, not a side chain, but a software layer. :)
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