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· 2 min read
Iñigo Querejeta Azurmendi

High level summary​

The four open fronts that the crypto team is working on are:

  • MuSig2: We are almost ready to reach a point where the MuSig2 library is ready for usage by the Hydra team.
  • Mithril: We started to think how Mithril-core can be designed such that it can be leverage by contexts where the verifiers run full nodes
  • cardano-base: The VRF and BLS branchs are still open and in progress
  • KES agent: We keep progressing with KES secure forgetting implementation as well as the KES agent.

Low level summary​

MuSig2​

  • We redesigned the library so that MuSig2 lib users don't need to be aware of the underlying secp256k1 library PR#31
  • We are introducing a more granular error handling mechanism PR#33
  • We rethought the API and made it more consistent with the underlying secp256k1 library PR#35

Mithril​

  • The mithril crates in general will be published in crates.io, and we adapted the core library's README PR#616
  • We are modifying the individual signature to not contain the VK and stake. This was not necessary, as the current design requires the aggregator of Mithril certificates to know this information PR#620

cardano-base​

  • We've been still working in updating to the latest version of the VRF. In particular we modified the cbits to use the latest version of libsodium stable (1.0.18) PR#341
  • SKs, VKs and VRF outputs will be compatible across the different versions. We are implementing conversion functions for simple transitions PR#344
  • Benchmarks on pairing built-ins have already started, so we were finalising some CI concerns and final remarks on the BLS PR, so that it can be merged as soon as we have green light from plutus PR#266

KES agent​

  • We keep progressing in the secure forgetting PR and resolving some bugs on memory handling PR#255
  • Increasing the test framework to make sure concurrency is properly treated by the KES Agent, for which we are including refcounted references. General progress in the implementation.

· One min read
Sebastian Nagel

High-level summary​

This week, the Hydra team attended the Cardano Summit in Lausanne, where Sebastian gave a presentation about Hydra and the whole team connected with the Cardano Community. After the public event, th Hydra team also conducted a workshop, which provided room for a retrospective, various planning sessions and they hacked together on different ideas.

What did the team achieve this week​

What are the goals of next week​

  • Monthly report & review meeting
  • Tie up several loose ends / branches.
  • Resolve Tx validity discussions & PRs.
  • Review cicero PR & try it out.

· 3 min read
Jared Corduan

High level summary​

We released CIP-1694, our proposal for entering the Voltaire phase. Please come join the discussion, this will be an incredibly exciting transition for Cardano and we want everyone to participate!

We now have a sensible way to version all of the serialization schemes used in the ledger. The draft pull request was polished, reviewed, and merged this week. This solves many problems that have vexed us since the beginning of the Shelley ledger era.

Everyone working on the Cardano node is working together to improve our release process, and the ledger team in particular dedicated one engineer to help with these efforts for the next release.

Lower level summary​

The Conway ledger era​

The current proposal in CIP-1694 encompasses two new ledger eras. The first era will be called Conway, after the English mathematician John Horton Conway. The community facing aspects of the Conway ledger era will be very minimal, but it will pave the way for introducing liquid democracy. The details can be viewed here. We do not yet have a formal specification for the Conway era. Our plan is to debut the formal ledger model. Briefly, the Conway ledger era will:

  • introduce SPO voting for hard forks (in the spirit of the now abandoned CIP-47)
  • provide an on-chain mechanism for rotating the governance keys
  • re-plumb the ledger rules involving governance to be in line with CIP-1694

Versioned CBOR​

We now have the ability to easily tie our serialization schemes to the Cardano major protocol version. We still aim to preserve backwards compatibility as much as possible, but we now have a principled plan for resolving problems (see CIP-ledger-cbor). In particular, we can now address several long standing issues, such as issue-2444, issue-2965, and issue-3003.

The final (and massive!) pull request which brought us the versioning is pull-3138.

Deposit tracking​

The draft pull request which was exploring how best to track individual deposits is much closer now to being ready to take out of draft (pull-3127). For background on the issue, see issue-3113. This is quite an invasive change which effects many of our tests, which we are now addressing.

Technical debt​

As always, we keep working on technical debt. We have deduplicated a some things: pull-3129, pull-3162. We have memoized a problematic computation (though more due diligence is needed before we can merge): pull-3141.

Node release​

We have been helping with the node release efforts. See pull-4608.

· 2 min read
Sebastian Nagel

High-level summary​

This week, the Hydra team released version 0.8.1, which includes several fixes and a user-wished extension of the persistence introduced by 0.8.0 of replaying server outputs to make clients like the hydra-tui be aware of the latest hydra-node state. The team also worked on the specification and closing gaps in the on-chain scripts, collaborated with the education team on a Hydra tutorial and also renamed the repository from hydra-poc to hydra!

What did the team achieve this week​

  • Implemented replaying of server outputs to address #580
  • Released version 0.8.1 containing this and other fixes Release notes
  • Worked on the bounded tx validity as one of the on-chain script fixes, but couldn’t finish it just yet #615
  • Collaborated with the education team on a Hydra tutorial.
  • Discovered and discussed issues with the “seen ledger”.
  • Renamed the Hydra repository hydra-poc -> hydra

What are the goals of next week​

  • Create and discuss an ADR about handling tx validity correctly.
  • Attend the Cardano Summit in Lausanne. Hydra will be topic of one talk! Save the date+time: "Developing Hydra" on Day 2, Nov 21st, 13:50 CET
  • Have a team workshop / hackathon after the summit:
    • Retrospective
    • Roadmapping session
    • Hack on something complex or useful

· 2 min read
Iñigo Querejeta Azurmendi

High level overview​

The Mithril team has released their second distribution 2246.1 following the activation of the alpha version of the new release process. They continued refining its implementation and added a new set of artifacts to the distributions, such as Debian packages and macOS/Windows binaries. The team also enhanced the Mithril Explorer, which now provides more detailed information about epoch settings and easier access to multiple aggregators for the users. They have also worked on an enhanced mechanism for node versioning, storage, and communication protocol. They also implemented version detections for the signer and aggregator nodes, designed the automatic store upgrade feature for these nodes, and enhanced the documentation of the configuration parameters of the several Mithril networks.

Finally, the team continued working on the elaboration of the CIP that will allow the decentralization of Mithril by relying on the Cardano node network layer.

Low level overview​

  • Released a new Mithril distribution 2246.1
  • Completed the first stage of the store migrations process #562
  • Added a Mithril API version that is now exposed in the headers of the requests sent and received by the nodes #565
  • Enhanced the explorer UI with epoch settings information and aggregators management on browser local storage #576
  • Prepared a Daedalus synchronization benchmark video with/without Mithril #606
  • Upgraded the Cardano nodes of the testing Mithril networks to 1.35.4 #594
  • Worked on implementing SPO tests nodes on testing Mithril networks #563
  • Worked on the CIP design for Mithril piggybacked on the Cardano network layer #588
  • Worked on the refactorizaton of the aggregator multi signer engine #398