[ Proposal ] $2,000,000 Community Fund Proposal to hire Microsoft to make Cosmos transaction processing more Distributed and Scalable

Introduction The Cosmos Blockchain Ecosystem is a decentralized network of interconnected blockchains that relies on the Atom binary for consensus and transaction processing. However, the current monolithic architecture of the Atom binary poses challenges in terms of scalability and distribution. This proposal outlines a plan to introduce distributed ordering and processing using Apache Kafka and a load balancer, enabling a more scalable and resilient architecture aligned with the decentralized nature of the Cosmos network increasing the value for Atom holders. Current Architecture and Challenges The Atom binary currently operates in a monolithic manner, where a single node handles transaction ordering, processing and consensus. This approach faces limitations as the Cosmos network expands: • Scalability Limitations: The monolithic architecture can become overwhelmed with increased transaction volume, leading to performance degradation and potential network congestion. • Monolitihic Processing: The monolithic model introduces a bottleneck, making the network vulnerable to spamming or disruption if the nodes become saturated with transitions. Proposed Solution with…

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Conversation starter. Soliciting feedback from experts outside the core cosmos teams, Microsoft, seem to be something that could be healthy for the community as biases exist among the good ole’ boy relationship dynamics of those who have contributed heavily to the development of the CosmosSDK.

Not that the various core contributors haven’t developed a worthwhile product, but this is an opportunity to engage the resources of an established tech heavy organization to improve upon the Atom Economic Zone product. The proposal here is specifically to expand the transaction processing capacity of the Atom Hub, but it might be a time where opportunities - such as integration with artificial intelligence or quantum hardening could come into scope.

As a template for ideation because the protocol design would be different - check out the white paper linked here. The Regulated Liability Network (RLN) Whitepaper on Scalability and Performance - SETL

Furthermore - just to add to my own mess here - not to get off topic, but I broached the subjects of artificial intelligence and quantum hardening for a purpose, mainly beacuse the addition of a transaction que is a location Ai can perform well. I understand how IBM Hyperledger integrates IBM Watson. Also, I previously broached the subject of quantum hardening of the platform and a solution to accomplish it, the solution I suggested is one of a couple that are possibly viable. 1) being an authorization token issued by an auth server with auth gate out in front of the transactional endpoint, perhaps with two-factor authentication to make a H2M (Human to Machine) transaction, there is also M2M (Machine to Machine) auth gating that can be implemented - 2) some flavor of zero-knowledge proofs.

All these subjects are worthwhile in exploring and gauging feedback from the community as to how they would want to maximize the value of their holdings.

Here is a blog post for a Universal Basic Income paradigm I have called the Universal Basic Income Feedback Loop. Essentially the hypothesis is such that the international implementation of Ai, an increasing reliance of robotics and deployment of blockchain technology will reduce the cumulative number of hours human labor will be required in a number of industries. That being said - an area of opportunity is blockchain payments - taxation - in robotic technologies to subsidize a Univeral Basic Income. This is another area worth exploring and engaging Microsoft as a partner. Cosmos technology already exists that allows frictionless integration into robotics. Implementation details would necessitate a broader discussion for the proper “taxation” of robotics. Life is getting better, technology is improving - I do recognize that there are some who hold opinions that traditional establishments are evil - governments/corporations/banks, but I think this perspective falls short in recognizing the amount of investment derived from governments, corporations and banks that have the effect of improving the quality-of-life. Swapping one mature imperfect system that an undercurrent of…

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Why is this the first I have heard about these

jasonsprouse:

scalability and distribution

Issues. Can we get some context from other Cosmos validators and engineers?
Also is this solution already built or is it something we will need to build out and implement?

This type of thinking seems to me to be visionary and way ahead of its time. I warn you however that you will receive pushback in terms of people scoffing at and ignoring these ideas, because if it doesn’t affect them directly and immediately, then it is someone else’s problem. Good luck though and I hope you will be successful.

I’ve been a Cosmos supporter since before the Cosmos white paper was published. Essentially the value of “sharding” a chain with the “app chain” thesis was apparent very early on, and in my opinion it’s a good solution to problems that existed at that time in the blockchain space. Hush: Why is this the first I have heard about these jasonsprouse: scalability and distribution Issues. Can we get some context from other Cosmos validators and engineers? Also is this solution already built or is it something we will need to build out and implement? There is a difference between distributed systems and decentralized systems, but some of the mechanics are similar - multiple nodes holding state, ect. Fallbacks and redundancy - and even latency, are designs in distributed systems. What I’ve raised here is…modularizing the monolithic processing capacity of the Atom Economic Zone by introducing some tools from distributed systems similar to what is spec’d in the Regulated Liability Networks paper. Hypothetically this would allow Atom to handle the load of it’s varied services and not necessitate fractured app-chain states. There are some visionary…

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As an afterthought - in relation to OpenAi and additional alignment that might exist there, the 1st quantum hardening solution suggested above can be achieved with Auth-O. “Sign in with Worldcoin” is now available on Okta’s Auth0 Marketplace World Coin has an Auth-O integration. They are also working on the Universal Basic Income strategy.

I take the approach of being optimistically cautious about different technologies. The Orb is one of those, however it might suit some people’s flavor of security. The beauty of Auth-O is there’re multiple providers that could be implemented.

1. Sign in with Ethereum - Example Auth-O impl on a server not hosted momentarily
2. 2-Factor Authentication
3. Social Sign-In

No matter what ones level of skepticism is, an Auth-O auth-gate would provide a layer of security to achieve quantum hardening of the underlying PKC, but there are other common goals where synergies emerge.

Dude, seriously? The TPS on the Cosmos Hub is 1. Can we stop shooting bazookas at birds? For now a slingshot is fine. When we have a scalability problem then we will deal it. From all the chains I am looking at now, Osmosis has the highest TPS of 7. SEI has a TPS of 50 but that chain is custom chain and its consensus mechanism is overridden and made faster. In any case, 50 tps is not a reason to do any of this stuff. When you get to TPS of 800-900 and start reaching the 1000 limit, then you start looking for solution. Because it is sharded, 1000 TPS for an appchain should basically do the job for almost all chains with the exception of 2-3 situations.

I don’t mind research but practically speaking we would be funding a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.

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Thank God for people in the community such as yourself. Genuinely a reasonable perspective. A subject of this funding proposal is exploratory in nature and is directed towards robotics and humans interfacing with robotics. It’s not addressing the paradigm as it is, but as we would like it to be.

Since the SDK is opensource there are teams that could hypothetically take up this task. The funding proposal would in turn be an investment from the community to in some way shape and form get an ROI. Economics suggest that protocol revenue is essential to drive demand. When Ethereum first got started there was an ambitious project that was going to fund hardware/software/automation tools called - the DAO. Core development of the Cosmos tech stack, including consensus improvements developed by Sei, are all pieces that would be accessed in a final product.

Let competetion assume responsibility, or active investment from the community.

Is this for real or did April come early?

No this is for real, but the joke must be in good nature.

Here is a prior contribution that I offered up to the community. ISO-20022 - Cosmos Ecosystem Financial Messaging Standardization - Miscellaneous - Cosmos Hub Forum No more or less serious than the value that could be extracted from that.

Instead of value - maybe credibility among institutions who have high standards and expectations of doing business is a better perspective, which in turn - equates to value.

this should be split into seperate proposals.

we’ve got 1) proposal to modularize the architecture (reasonable thing to discuss) and 2) proposal to spend $2m to hire microsoft consultants (kek?)

Discussions around architecture are always helpful.

the additional points around AI, quantum computing, and using 2FA to gatekeep transactions is ridiculous imo

Point taken. • No harm in exploring architecture. • Yes, this as an investment from the community that could lead to other business relationships. I know of some fairly unsophisticated robotics solutions where public transactions for the services of the robotic products would be acceptable. Using something like DAO DAO to manage teams all around the world as the human managers overseeing the business processes of the robotics is also in scope. zilayo: the additional points around AI, quantum computing, and using 2FA to gatekeep transactions is ridiculous imo The implementation of this is much less technical debt than modularizing the architecture. Quantum computing is a credible threat, and the earlier this is addressed the better - especially if additional businesses flourish around this approach. 2-Factor authentication is a secure security measure that gives people more time to decide if they want to make a transaction and a registered IP makes sure that the device requesting the transaction is associated with the account. Reduces any attack vector significantly. The AI aspect of what I’ve broached here I honestly do not know how it will apply, but…

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Microsoft is in the title. The body of the message does not mention Microsoft even once. An proposal with such a title should not appear online. Otherwise, this is just an attempt to hype.

On topic: Current TPS ~ 1 and it is not necessary.

It’s noy hype. There is no need for it to be mentioned. It should be inferred by context in which ways the business dynamics are being approached.

Thank you for sharing your opinion though.

Correct title - “$2,000,000 Community Fund Proposal: Integrate Apache Kafka & Load Balancer in Cosmoshub to make transaction processing more Distributed and Scalable”

“no_with_veto” from me if this proposal goes online with your title. Because many people read only the title, and the title you suggested does not correspond to the content. Thanks for your suggestions to improve Cosmoshub.

The title can be changed, but it’s not the full scope of the milestones to improve the hub. Adding the additional objectives to the body of the content instead of as comments would be more in alignment with the overall intent. The body of the content is a primary objective though.

Here is a diagram that describes an architecture of how zones could connect via a Kafka Que ( millions of messages per second ) and be routed to a central zone and storage. One of the 1st objectives I recall of the hub was to be a fly-wheel of commerce connecting all the zones - opt-in, of course. This architecture would be similar to what I envisioned the initial objectives of Cosmos being. I think there was a limit on what the hub could process as the central routing of Cosmos, and as there were exponentially more zones the complexity of handling all these connections increased. This kind of architecture would only connect to the que. The packets contain all the routing information and the data-flow is bi-directional. As of now there are limits on how many consumer chains and how many transactions the hub can process. This is just one example of different architectures that could be evaluated. Screenshot 2023-12-13 163322 771×606 56.2 KB The SDK can be modified to create/save to a database for every zone. The data packet contains all the data to create/save to a DB associated with every zone. Not sure if it’s tables or how the separation of concerns for all the…

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On the host state machine - or just in the client app, having a list of target machines or the ability for the user to manually input a target machine and save it in the app cache, would initiate the transfer to the target machine through a sink connector when a state update occurs on the host machine.

A workable description of how this system would function with this architecture??? Acknowledgement packets for successful updates on the target machine or timeout still applicable.

jasonsprouse:

As an afterthought - in relation to OpenAi and additional alignment that might exist there, the 1st quantum hardening solution suggested above can be achieved with Auth-O. “Sign in with Worldcoin” is now available on Okta’s Auth0 Marketplace World Coin has an Auth-O integration. They are also working on the Universal Basic Income strategy.

I had never looked at Sui until yesterday. Sui has Auth-O login flow with ZKP as a primitive in the SDK. What I initially proposed as a solution was just an auth-flow using Auth-O for quantum hardening purposes. World Coin has Auth-O integration and they also have another auth solution called Incognito Actions.

I am having more or less the same discussion on the osmosis forum - all cosmos chains should be assessing these strategies - in my opinion.

TL&DR Good feedback. It’s well known that quantum computers could be a vulnerability to cryptographic systems with their current architectures, either by brute force or by implementing shor or gover’s algorithm - hence the title, QUNTUM...

Despite the effort to craft this proposal, we think it falls short of all the pre-requisite due diligence to pass through in order to get clearance for on an on-chain vote. The proposal claims to address problems described by a monolithic architecture of node operation, which is actually quite false due to the distributed nature of consensus operators in the Hub. Each validator is in charge of receiving, filtering, transmitting and ultimately processing transactions. Some features and parameters can be adjusted independently by each node (min fee, internal RPC filtering, etc…) creating a diverse set of defenses. If we were to ever face the type of attack you are mentioning in the post, individual nodes might come to different solutions, which in turn offers a much more resilient approach than relying on third party dependencies. Moreover the Cosmos Ecosystem in general seems to have opted for a different route in order to address the challenges you mentioned. Some teams have even entirely dedicated their work to overcome these challenges, notably Skip. docs.skip.money ✨ Block SDK Overview | Skip Protocol Docs Skip Block SDK Quickstart…

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Mainly this…I’m more seeking consensus building - way before I’d ever put a proposal on the hub. There are several things to pick apart here, and although I appreciate your spirited response nothing of what I am saying is inaccurate. I’m not quite sure if you understand which problem(s) I am addressing. jasonsprouse: Conversation starter. The protocol design in this Regulated Liability Network is done in a manner that functions as individual microservices - each one of them scalable dependent on the load the system is experiencing, but it does seem similar to some of the functionality in the BlockSDK link you shared. I’m not familiar with the BlockSDK, but the protocol name is familiar - Skip. A monolithic architecture just means a single binary runs the system and will perform all the functionality of that app - including, in the instance of a distributed system like Cosmos - gossip transactions to other nodes in the network to reach consensus on the state of the network. jasonsprouse: As a template for ideation because the protocol design would be different - check out the white paper linked here. The Regulated Liability Network (RLN) Whitepaper…

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I am not a tech expert, but the last 24 hours have shown we don’t need this. Validator event without this managed ~1000 TX per block.

There is more than one issue being addressed.

• The architecture structure is to explore what is possible with the SDK.

• Sui designed their login flow the way they did for a reason - to be quantum secure. The attack would affect individual wallets and loss of funds would be the outcome.

• Business relationships where alignment with other projects would be healthy is the other main driver for this proposal soliciting feedback