2024-02-12 Codex Weekly

Codex Update Feb 6th - Feb 12th §

The Codex team continues to make progress with various initiatives to wrap up the demo for the Q1/Q2 public testnet release. An internal testnet has been running for the past few weeks and has been used to test the latest version of Codex and can be accessed using the Codex Testnet Starter documentation.

Ongoing and new lines of research and development will soon begin in preparation for the next version of Codex that will be used for the mainnet release.. Here are the updates from different team members and their ongoing work. Development is currently broken into three distinct teams:

1. Client, Testing, and Infrastructure
2. Marketplace
3. Research

The different teams have actively moving on various fronts. The following are their team updates to various ongoing Epics.

Client, Testing and Infrastructure §

Epic: Nim Improvements §

Completed:

• Add Nim-matrix workflow to run on merge queue
• Changes to build improvements proposal so default version for the compiler is now represented as special version repo_version which can be accessed locally and in CI

Ongoing:

• Nim memory profiler

Epic: Wiring the Proving System §

Completed:

• Integrated zk verifier into nim-codex

Ongoing:

• Started reviewing the Circom circuit

Epic: Improve Client Stability §

Completed:

• Two PRs for testing framework (one PR #93, and one PR #94)

Ongoing:

• Run Continuous-Test outside of the cluster to reproduce ‘file size issue’

Epic: Infra §

Completed: Ongoing:

• Create Codex Helm chart
• Deploy Codex Storage nodes in Testnet cluster #115
• Tracking down the timeout issues in Codex
• Updates to logtools
  • Now understand what deploy IDs and test runs are (4 min video here);
• Worked on the block flow tracker

Marketplace §

Epic: End-to-end Testing §

Completed:

• Fixed decoding issue in nim-ethers
• Workaround for that same decoding issue
  • Can’t use the fix from nim-ethers yet, Codex is still on old version of chronos
• Published nim-serde
  • Finalized nim-serde api: now has two main pragmas, serialize and deserialize, that can be applied at the object-level or field-level:
  • Each can set key (valid at field-level), ignore (valid at field-level), and mode (valid at object-level)
    • mode can be one of:
      • OptOut
      • OptIn
      • Strict
  • Many more tests for the nim-serde lib — serialize OptIn, OptOut, Strict and deserialize OptIn, OptOut, Strict
  • Added a comprehensive README to nim-serde
  • Added CI to serde, with branch protection rules on master
  • Added support for deserializing seq[byte]
• Updated nim-ethers json-rpc and chronos upgrade PR to use nim-serde instead of the json util. Created the PR https://github.com/codex-storage/nim-ethers/pull/64

Ongoing:

• WIP on finishing the Availabilities API endpoints tweaks
• Tried to integrate nim-serde in nim-codex, but running into symbol clashes with parseJson, so changed parseJson to JsonNode.parse, still needs to be integrated into nim-codex

Research §

2024 R&D Goals
1. Proving system and aggregation improvements (folding or lookups)
2. Aggregator/validator design
3. DHT improvements
4. Tokenomics and incentive design
5. Bandwidth incentives
6. Dynamic data (appendable data)

Completed: Ongoing:

• More work on the algebra backend (pairings, APIs)
• Work towards an independent Groth16 prover (so that we can debug the Nim one) - an initial version of that seems to work now