2024-03-25 Codex Weekly

Codex Update Mar 19th - Mar 25th §

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 §

Client §

Completed

• Various fixes for prover-verifier integration
  • https://github.com/codex-storage/nim-codex/pull/702
• Split prover-verifier integration into several PRs and merged them into master
  • https://github.com/codex-storage/nim-codex/pull/702#issuecomment-1986256598\

Ongoing

• Syncing up with testnet owners to help think through our use cases and whether or not we have gaps in our QA/testing plan;
• Put together a small tutorial on deploying contracts on a local Geth network with some code.

Testing §

Completed

• Fixed proof generation is dist-test environment
• Fixed crash in dist-test env related to blockchain inspection
• Bring up-to-date continuous tests (enable transient-node and marketplace test scenarios) Ongoing
• Why do proofs with EC params 1-0 fail?
• Node response to fill-slot call is unreliable in geth env
• Wrap up discord-reward bot

Infrastructure §

Completed

• ✅ Install Oauth2 proxy in Testnet cluster #141
• ✅ Deploy Testnet cluster components #57
• ✅ Install Vector in Testnet cluster #144
• ✅ Configure monitoring in Testnet cluster #147
• ✅ Send Codex and Geth Bootstrap nodes logs and metrics to the Testnet cluster #148

Ongoing

• �️ Configure Grafana dashboards for Testnet resources #154
• �️ Add Release workflow for Codex #749

Marketplace §

Completed

• nim-ethers
  • Support Solidity’s custom errors
    • https://github.com/codex-storage/nim-ethers/pull/69
  • Update dependencies
    • https://github.com/codex-storage/nim-ethers/pull/70
  • Fix flaky test
    • https://github.com/codex-storage/nim-ethers/pull/71
  • Merged fix for Solidity getters
    • https://github.com/codex-storage/nim-ethers/pull/63
• codex-contracts-eth:
  • Finished verifier refactor:
    • https://github.com/codex-storage/codex-contracts-eth/pull/83
• codex-storage-proofs-circuits:
  • Merged code review PR:
    • https://github.com/codex-storage/codex-storage-proofs-circuits/pull/5
• questionable:
  • Worked out a way to handle generic Results in without statements:
    • https://github.com/codex-storage/questionable/pull/59

Ongoing

• See previous week

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)
7. Encryption

Completed

• wrote an initial draft notes about Plonk; github (WIP)

Ongoing

• working towards implementing a Plonkish prover with custom accelerator gadgets, so that we can test proof system ideas
• realized that proof system idea has a botleneck; may still speed up Poseidon hashing, but the new botleneck is much worse for binary circuits like SHA256. To make the latter practical needs new ideas.