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20 September 2023

Monthly review meeting

September 2023

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Report | Recording

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Agenda

  • Demos

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  • Hydra/Mithril = Cardano scaling workshop

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  • Hydra roadmap update

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  • Bits and pieces from Hydra Development

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  • Mithril roadmap and project status�
  • Current use cases and open source contributions

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Demo

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  • Workshop experiments

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    • Aiken commit scripts

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    • “Shallow” cardano-node

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Cardano Scaling workshop in Nantes, France

  • 3 days, 12 people (Eng / Arch / Delivery / Product), in Nantes, France
  • Workshop followed Open Space principles: Agenda set by participants according to what they want to focus on

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  • Some topics covered:
    • Mithril & Hydra use cases
    • Synergies between teams and products
    • Coding experiments: Kupo x Hydra, Aiken smart contracts, Connecting to node in Rust…
    • Tezos & OCaml
    • Organising documentation
    • …
  • More details to be published soon

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Hydra Roadmap Current - ex ideas

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https://github.com/orgs/input-output-hk/projects/21/views/7

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Hydra Roadmap Current

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https://github.com/orgs/input-output-hk/projects/21/views/7

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Roadmap Previous - ex ideas

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https://github.com/orgs/input-output-hk/projects/21/views/7

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Roadmap Previous

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https://github.com/orgs/input-output-hk/projects/21/views/7

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UPDATE

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Delivered features

  • Update tutorial and include Mithril #997
    • Make tutorial work with latest version of hydra-node
    • Support a wide range of platforms
    • Ensure it’s kept up-to-date (using continuous integration)
    • Preparation for Hydra master-class at RareEvo

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  • Support InlineScriptDatum in new async committing API #1043
    • User submitted request
    • Enhanced the API to cover also these cases

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Current features

  • Hydra network resilience #118
    • Improves liveness of an open head
    • Allows for more robust operation
    • Likely done via a configurable message re-submission mechanism
    • May need to switch the layer two network protocol
      • should do that earlier than later

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  • Hydra node software & protocol updates #191
    • Ensures upgrade paths for Hydra components exist
    • No accidental break of interfaces
    • Versioning and reporting incompatibility
    • Requires some further grooming
      • Golden tests of hydra-plutus was the first step

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Hydra Development: Network resilience

  • Hydra resiliency at the node level
    • Bob persists its state
    • On failure/recovery it recovers its state

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  • Hydra resiliency at the head level
    • Can not distinguish between failure and non cooperation
    • Should close the head in presence of non cooperation
    • Ensure safety but not liveness
    • Can we distinguish between failure and non cooperation?

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  • Exploring more resilient network stack

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Hydra Development: Incremental commits/decommits

  • First experiment was convincing that off-chain / node logic is easily amenable
  • Groomed and split in two
    • Incremental commit#199

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    • Incremental decommit#1057

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  • Currently: Review design with researchers

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Hydra Development: Refactor chain state

  • Avoid recursive type in persisted chain state
    • We have refactored this to be kept as a non-empty history.

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  • Backward compatible change
  • Smaller persistence footprint
    • Now the chain state persisted is only individual points of the chain state instead of the recursive history.
  • The interface between chain and logic layer stayed the same

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Mithril status

Recent changes:

  • Client: Concurrent download and unpacking of the snapshots (v2335.0)
  • Aggregator: New compression of snapshot reducing the size by ~%40 (to be released)

Upcoming:

  • Investigate UTXOs data type

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Total

Mithril

Active Stake

~22B Ada

1.29B Ada (5.7%)

#SPO’s

2606

75 (2.9%)

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Mithril roadmap

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Releases

Mithril Beta

Mithril 1.0

Mithril 2.0

Mithril 3.0

Goal

Mainnet integration and testing

Core functionalities and data types

Decentralized aggregator

Full security

Features

  • Sign full node snapshots
  • Lace Integration
  • Bug fixing and improvements
  • Sign UTXO set
  • Incremental snapshot
  • Decentralized key registration
  • Multiple aggregators
  • Sign new data types (ledger state, stake distribution, rewards, protocol parameters)
  • P2P network
  • Cardano Node Integration

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Open source contributions

  • Hydra: Lightning network-style payments use case write-up by @k-solutions

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  • Aiken: Started an emacs aiken-mode by @ch1bo (in course of our experiments)

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  • Hydra: Small fix in the docs (from workshop) by @caike

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  • Mithril: Community contributed feature ideas

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Current scaling use cases

  • Hypix - productized hydraw�
  • Book.io - scalable minting and distribution of tokenized books�
  • Midnight - dust airdrop and side-chain operatio�
  • SingularityNet - pay-per-use API / Cardano port of an existing Ethereum solution�
  • SundaeLabs - scaling their DEX using gummiworm / hydra ledger-only as validators�
  • Emurgo/Obsidian - general interest in creating a payment channel network

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Questions & Feedback

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Report | Recording

HYDRA

HYDRA | September 2023 |