Table of Content

Executive Summary

MVP Phase

Minimal set of deliverables required for making some VNs permissionless:

• LibP2P routing attacks (see ‣)
• ENs handling repetitive requests for chunk data packs

From a product perspective, this has somewhat limited value, as VNs can only approve correct results and the protocol continues even without their approvals after some wait time (emergency sealing). The time line of this phase is largely constrained by finishing the LibP2P routing attack work.

Step towards the Mature Protocol

The next step would be to redesign the VNs to implement the following requirements of the mature protocol (enumeration based on detailed explanation below):

• Item 3: extensive checking mode
• Item 1: VNs tolerating malicious inputs from the ENs, detecting them as protocol violations and flagging them.
• Item 6: speculative verification.

We want to develop a design that satisfies all three requirements. This is because each requirement substantially impacts the VNs internal design. Based on my experience, it is unrealisitic to assume that we can design the VN ignoring any one feature and then add on the ignored feature later. Most likely such an approach would lead to repetitive redesigns and large-scale refactorings, producing substantial amount of throw away work in the long term.

While a little intimidating at first, I think it is a doable engineering lift to conceptually design the VN to satisfy all three requirements. As long as the requirements will have been taken into account in the design, we can probably postpone implementing some components and roll out the upgrade iteratively.