List of Inflight items (2024)

Updated: 19/08/2024

This page is written on behalf of the Core Infrastructure Roadmap working group, the information contained is subject to change and amendment by the working group at any time.

Introduction

The objective of this document is to provide context for the inflight items within Intersect. This list was developed in collaboration with the various suppliers and item champions to encourage accuracy. At the end of this document, we will provide details of future planned work to improve this list further. If you like to read more of the progress on the milestones and deliverables, please refer to the milestone reports published here.

The CIR-wg recognises that public accessibility becomes inherently important as an Open Source environment, however not all documents linked below are publicly accessible - Please send a request to the document owners if you require access to view them!

OCG-1. Cardano Onchain Governance - Voltaire Era (Pre-contracted)

Onchain governance is being implemented on Cardano by engaging with the Community in an open dialogue, the implementation is being carried out primarily by implementation of CIP-1694 on the Blockchain

CIP-1694 is implementing a set of Ledger rules to provide the following:

expose a set of Governance Actions which will allow Community to create governance-actions which can be voted by Ada holders
key management for Constitutional Committee (CC) - the CC is a selected group composed of founding and Community Members who opine on the validity of a raised Governance Action
voted Delegated Representatives (DReps) who see voting power to represent smaller community Ada holders in a larger bloc and vote based on their view on the value of a 'proposed Cardano change' Implementation: IOI have been engaged to implement CIP-1694 based on work already being in-flight, and fitness to undertake the work as deemed by Technical Steering Committee (TSC) and community support for this work to be prioritized

LSM-1. Increase Capability to store UTxOs on disk using LSM (Pre-contracted)

With the continued growth of the Cardano Blockchain Ledger, the need to move the ledger state from memory (RAM) to disk is ever more pressing and important. Once achieved, this will enable Cardano to reach Bitcoin scale in terms of the number of users & wallets and the size of the UTxO set. At the same time SPOs nodes and full node wallets will be able to function on commodity hardware, including cheap cloud instances. Until this is achieved however, the RAM use of full nodes will inexorably increase, with corresponding increased costs for SPOs and full node wallet users for ever-bigger hardware capacity.

The implementation of the LSM component is a crucial enabling step that provides the combination of features, performance and testability needed to support storing the bulk of the ledger state on disk. The LSM component itself is standalone. A follow-up stage of the project will be to fully exploit it within the node (in the consensus and ledger layers) to store all the large portions of the ledger state on disk, both the UTxO and the several stake-related tables.

The component itself takes the form of a Haskell library for managing tables of key-value data stored persistently on disk. The component is specified as a stand alone component, in isolation from Cardano, with detailed functional and non-functional requirements. These requirements have been chosen to support the scaling goals for Cardano. For example, one performance target is to have a table (corresponding to the characteristics of the UTxO) of 100 million entries - which is roughly the size of Bitcoin - while achieving certain throughput targets. The work is structured as a fixed price, fixed schedule contract, with fixed functional and non-functional requirements.

ZKP-1. Implement Zero Knowledge proof (Pre-contracted)

With the growth Layer1 traffic, the ability to create a mechanism to allow the verification of information in a sidechain where all the underlying data is not necessarily needed, but a mechanism to ensure a high level of security, privacy and traceability is needed; this can be achieved using Zero Knowledge proofs.

The Midnight blockchain was recently announced, a sidechain of Cardano that leverages zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs). To aid in the launch of Midnight, side chains and future interoperability of Cardano as a whole, Galois work in collaboration with Intersect, IOI and the Electric Coin Company to implement recursion in a codebase Completed tasks, code deliverables, will be submitted for review via pull requests and will include unit and property based tests to improve quality. Pull requests will be made to the open source repository or the corresponding Privacy Scaling Explorations fork of the repository. All code deliverables will be implemented in Rust.

EDU-1. Enabling Documenting tools including Serialisation, Wallets and Education supporting Age of Voltaire (Pre-contracted)

With the age of Voltaire comes a new set of components, concepts and Governance mechanisms across Cardano, this deliverable includes upgrade of Yoroi Wallet, Serialisation library and also set of Education tools to usher in Voltaire.

Q1 2024 to produce a number of high quality Educational Materials - A covering every aspect of the ‘Age of Voltaire’, with study guides, videos and webinars, this includes all things CIP 1694. This supports growth and understand in all community members new and old. The development and testing of Cardano Serialisation library, including the Cardano Serialisation library updates required for CIP 1694. This is a library, written in Rust, for serialization & deserialization of data structures used in Cardano's Haskell implementation of Alonzo along with useful supporting utility functions.

OBG-1. Implementing the Ouroboros Genesis protocol (Pre-contracted)

Genesis is a new version of the Consensus layer that allows new nodes to join the network without requiring a trusted set of peers to bootstrap from. This should ultimately allow decommissioning the core relays.

All implementation work, in addition to appropriate testing, benchmarking, and documentation is a continuation of work from 2023. This covers the remaining testing infrastructure, as well as the full system test suite designed to verify and validate the Genesis implementation.

OSM-1. Deliver an Open Source methodology for Cardano (Pre-contracted)

The Open Source Office (OSO) and the Open Source Committee (OSC) are tasked with ensuring Core Cardano becomes efficiently open sourced by creating a strategy (OSS) to curtail the situation.

Intersect, since January, took ownership of 27 “Core-Cardano” repos which are very centralized in nature from previous IOG management. There are strategies and policies in place but need to undergo testing and evaluation with reference to their implementation. Tweag is contracted to support bodies of work done by the Intersect OSPO.

GOV-1. Implementation of GovTool user journeys (Pre-contracted)

Disclaimer: Govtool consists of multiple vendors, there’s pending work to split this out by vendors. This item presents the implementation from Byron Network OU

GovTool is a webApp that implements key governance tools for important governance user journeys. Two key flows; DRep Explorer flow, Governance Action Submission flow, will be added in order to deliver a usable tool to the Cardano Community.

This implementation was previously worked on and will be continued by supporting the launch and running a beta testing period to discover and fix bugs, collect feedback and ideas for the community.

HWW-1. Ensure interoperability, performance and accessibility of Hardware Wallets (Pre-contracted)

The Ledger devices and Trezor devices are the most popular products on the market for secure management of cryptocurrencies - to ensure its continued practicality and use for the Cardano community a number of enhancements have been contracted.

Work is done to ensure the continued practical use of the Ledger and Trezor hardware wallets for the Cardano community and enhancements to support the Conway era.

GOV-2. Enable a Proposal Discussion tool (Pre-contracted)

Proposal Discussion Forum (PDF) is a subset of GovTool, which consists of multiple vendors, there’s pending work to split this out by vendors. This item presents the implementation from WeDeliver.

With on-chain governance, introduced by CIP-1694, ada holders will be empowered to submit a governance action (GA) directly onto the Cardano mainnet. This ability will transform how decisions are made for the blockchain. To support CIP-1694's on-chain features, during the course of the CIP-1694 community workshops, attendees consistently requested off-chain processes and features to ensure GA's have been widely considered and socialized before they are submitted on-chain. In response, a grant was opened to develop a proposal discussion forum. As part of a new feature in the Govtool, the Proposal Discussion Forum enables, promotes, and facilitates structured public discourse, and presents the most relevant information about proposals. The tool will ultimately support ada holders when evaluating the strength of a proposal (and a subsequent governance action).

CHG-1. Chang Hard Fork Testing (Pre-contracted)

Supporting Chang hard fork development activities by performing regression testing and testing of new features.

BFH-1. BlockFetch (Pre-contracted)

Developing a modification to the block fetch ensure analogous responsiveness from block fetch peers, as an enhancement to the original Ouroboros Genesis work

GRA-1. Guardrails (Pre-contracted)

Tweag will provide Intersect with audits for the Guardrail script which handles a filtering of users' proposals before being subjected to votes

IDT-1. Identity Management (Pre-contracted)

Identity Management provides additional control and credential management for institutional members including X509 compatibility. Hot credentials can always be rotated but this requires consensus and an amount of coordination plus cost. A hard fork is needed if a member loses control of their cold credential and does not want to be re-elected by the community. Otherwise, the cold credential can be rotated using an update committee action.

Upon completion,Tweag will provide with audits for the Identity management script. This script thus relies on the latest PlutusV3 features around governance.

Future works planned

With what info we had, we were able to produce this list. Working with our suppliers, we were able to solicit earnest and insightful feedback as to how we can improve the list further. Here are some updates that we’re working on to include for future items: 1) Work Breakdown Structure 2) Business Benefit 3) Team Structure 4) Testing and Verification 5) Counterparty requirements 6) Impacted code structure: 7) Integration strategy 8) Dependencies 9) Artifacts/Deliverables that will be generated (beyond code) 10) Breaking down items based on objectives and contracts

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