2025-01-13 Nomos weekly

PPoS / Consensus / DA

Cryptarchia v1 protocol specification is now functionally complete but needs another review pass for coherence. The specification includes pseudocode for most important protocols. See specification document.
Started work on the Nomos Economic Model that integrates the three markets of the Base Layer.
Updated NomosDA Cryptographic Protocol spec to align with new standards.
Core Validator Set (CVS) Protocol:
- Extended design with discussion section
- Defined data and logic parts
- Working on complete protocol design document

KMS architecture document defines implementation of key handling within node
Implemented KMS (Key Management System) service with outer layer API (PR #981). Implementation is currently stalled pending specific key schema definition from CVS discussions.
Working on Connection Manager in DA POC (work in progress).

Analyzed communication and anonymity failure in Blendnet using linear trees model:
- Considered broadcasting where faulty and adversarial nodes are modeled by different random binary variables
- Derived relationship between number of communication paths (K) and path length (L)
- Found that K must grow exponentially with L for failure probabilities to decrease
- Results depend on probability of faulty nodes (q_F) and adversarial nodes (q_A)
- See summary document and detailed analysis
Extended latency measurements with non-uniform distribution:
- Planning to extend simulation for region-specific latency settings
- Working on connection manager design for Nomos implementation
- Refining initial latency report to provide formulas for estimating/evaluating results

IMT benchmarking in PoC shows ~10x improvement over initial SMT approach:
- Linear decrease in proof times switching from SMT to IMT
- With SMT, nullifier checking takes 650k cycles
- With 64bit path (full IMT), takes 130k cycles
- Still skeptical of batch mechanism potential due to uniform nullifier distribution
Progress on value and unit creation mechanism:
- Draft completed, awaiting validation for clean specification
- Common Ledger documents undergoing review process
Updated IMT implementation details and protocol steps prepared
Planning work on unit covenants

Integration of nullifier proofs in PoC alongside serialization improvements (PR #48)
Work on Proof of Equivalence showed proof times down to 17s
Postponing PoE until zones can produce bigger blocks due to executor proof time constraints
Plans to start working on data integration into notes and protocol for wallets

Improvements to the bundling process to fix inconsistent behavior and get all Linux bundle profiles working (PR #977).
Node Recovery system refactored into separate module for better organization and moved to nomos-services/utils (PR #975)
Published on-demand docker image for testnet container
Fixed issues with testnet metrics and tracing:
- Resolved services failing due to non-existent risc0 dependency
- Working on GitHub permissions update for public package access
- When image is accessible, Grafana dashboard with logs, traces and metrics will be available via testnet.nomos.tech
Investigating options for pinning risc0 binary:
- Current limitations with download rate limiting and version pinning
- Considering short-term solution with feature flag for mocked proofs
- Looking at options to have guaranteed working setup for integration tests, e2e tests and testnet
Improved cfgsync tool for more flexible tracing options (PR #980)
PingPong example merged (PR #975)
Starting design/research for the wallet-lib

Ongoing work on documentation:
- Ouroboros family draft completed and ready for publication
- Planning work on Crypsinous & Cryptarchia article draft
- NomosDA Cryptographic Protocol spec updated
- Various document reviews and updates in progress