Offshift v2 Dev Update: The Offshift Prover Network

We’re close to pulling back the curtain on what we’ve been busy with these last few weeks, and anticipate this will be the final update before the big reveal. As we move closer to the completion of our infrastructure code, we’re taking the first steps toward a decentralized proving network, and preparing to begin onboarding interested community members to join.

What is proving? Why do we need a network for it?

When transactions are broadcast, they still need to be delivered to the blockchain. Momiji uses batching to post many transactions at once, much like a rollup - but without an additional full chain. The prover network takes the place of relayers (from v1). Instead of choosing a single relayer, users can post transactions to an on-chain queue or a peer-to-peer gossip network.

How do I join? Why should I join?

Offshift has no built in fee, but much like the Ethereum network, gas must be paid to post transactions, and provers are incentivized to both prove your transactions and post them to the chain to be compensated. Every batch that is posted pays the wallet doing the publishing.

Provers are the backbone of Offshift v2. In order to maintain anonymity when sending private transactions, provers need to roll up user transactions and then post the final proof to the chain, which also processes on-chain state changes in the process. This also ensures the users never have to make an on-chain interaction themselves once they are inside the privacy system.

If you have a “high-end” modern computer, we invite you to participate in our upcoming prover network tests. In this case, high-end would mean eight-cores of recent Intel or AMD architecture, and 32GB of RAM minimum. No GPUs are required, and no work is wasted!

You are not required to get permission to be a prover. Our prover network launches day one with a completely permissionless contract (the existing testnet contract), and anyone who runs a prover node can submit transactions to the contract and collect fees.

If you’d like to participate, and are interested in receiving updates and running a prover, please join the new Offshift Prover Network Telegram group . More information will be posted there during the upcoming release.

What’s next?

The initial launch of the prover network will help us ensure the prover node software performs as expected, as well as give us time to take major feedback on the new frontend that is launching at the same time. Once things look stable, fees will be introduced, and the fee market system will have its own round of testing and tuning.

Each part of the upcoming updates will focus on battle-testing a specific part of the infrastructure to ensure it’s ready for launch. During this iteration phase, potential issues with the protocol will be ironed out and updates will be frequent as the network sees usage.

momiji-ts

Shortly after the release of the prover network, we will release documentation for the protocol library that powers it, momiji-ts. We’ve taken a page out of Aztec’s book, who did this recently by spending some time consolidating their libraries, coinciding with their frontend library release. This made it easier for us to do the same, and we hope this will make it easier for everyone else to interface with momiji.

Happy Holidays, and get ready for the release of the new frontend!