2024-03-04 Codex Weekly

Codex Update Feb 27th - Mar 4th §

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 §

Completed:

• Codex team members attended ETH Denver Ongoing:

Epic: Nim Improvements §

Completed: Ongoing:

• Started a PR to fix Atlas after SAT integration
• Finishing basic fixes PR in Atlas
• extracted the profiler into its own library
  • retained only the instrumentation modifications in our Chronos V4 branch
  • after we merge V4 into Codex (blocked by a bunch of issues), start a discussion with the Chronos folks to try to get the instrumentation part in

Epic: Wiring the Proving System §

Completed: Ongoing:

• Ceremony file setup

Epic: Improve Client Stability §

Completed: Ongoing:

• tracked a Codex bug during a V4 merge which turned out to be a compiler bug
  • with consequences to Chronos
  • bug resolution handled by Nim compiler team after being flagged as “showstopper”

Marketplace §

Epic: End-to-end Testing §

Completed:

• Add IsSyncing to nim-ethers
• Add sync check to codex startup
• In-flight flag for outgoing blocks
  • Discord role rewards based on on-chain state and events
    • Partially tested, requires fixed marketplace-dist-test
• Updated and merged: fix for block-retransmit issue
• Debug isSync (nim-ethers update) and update to testnet-starter

Ongoing:

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:

• Nim Groth16 prover finally appears to work correctly (though with the current workaround it also became significantly slower)
• Multi-threading support in the Nim Groth16 prover

Ongoing:

• Thinking about using FRI commitment for storage proofs
  • Hash based, includes RS, outsourceable, easy to prove large/r data sets
• Thinking about using KZG as updateable commitment
  • With efficient proofs for small/updateable data sets
• Debugging the multithreading bug in the prover
• checking out new research
• Speed up the “binary circuit” proposal by a factor of ~2x
• Thinking about a (supposedly fast) dedicated SHA256 proof protocol, and how to implement it