State of the Logos Network: September 2023
Logos mobilises, Waku scales, Codex at Stanford, Nomos explores design choices, and Vac publishes zkVM paper
Bathang
Logos recently stepped into the public eye, embarking on the path toward a network-state future. Our ecosystem is a hive of activity, building, refining, and broadcasting the network state thesis and the tech to actualise it. Logos Press Engine rounds up the major developments of recent months in this inaugural edition of State of the Logos Network.
State of the Logos network
Logos is fully committed to transparency and builds in the open. This progress update is intended as a non-technical summary of the Logos projects’ recent achievements, current ongoings, and future engagements. For a more granular and regularly updated view, check our ecosystem roadmap.
Logos
Although many of us have been working on Logos for some time, the collective’s first public outing took place at ‘The Birth of a Network State’ during the Ethereum Community Conference in July. Logos and allied projects occupied Galerie Joseph in Paris for a full-day programme dedicated to the Logos mission and the network state, and how our tech can lay their foundations. The event served as a declaration – Logos is alive.
Representatives from Logos, Waku, Vac, and Codex shared the stage with allies from Nym, DappNode, and Spearbit, attracting more than 100 of the network state-curious and the already convinced. Discussions and presentations ranged from the technical to the philosophical, with an inspiring keynote delivered by our co-founder Jarrad Hope, programme lead Corey Petty, and contributors from each of the collective’s core infrastructure teams.
We recorded the whole programme, which you can relive here.
In preparation for our public debut, Acid.info, Logos’ creative studio and memetics lab, revamped core infrastructure projects’ websites and documentation resources, unifying them visually, updating content to reflect recent developments, and affirming their position within the Logos sphere:
Since Paris, the collective’s attention remains focused on bringing the Logos mission and tech to a wider audience both digitally and in the physical world. Regarding the former, Dmitriy Ryajov, the project lead for Codex, and Dr. Goemon, Logos’ activism and campaigns director, started our bi-weekly Twitter X Spaces on 22 Aug. with a conversation on using peer-to-peer tech to put network state political philosophy into practice. The next edition will be on 19 Sept.
Follow Logos on X for more information.
Meanwhile, Acid.info’s events management division is scoping out opportunities to spread our ideas and technologies on the conference circuit. Jarrad will speak at the 10th annual Hacker’s Congress in Prague at the end of September and at ETHRome in early October.
Expect further updates in future State of the Logos Network editions as the schedule fills out.
Finally, we have been building and populating the collective’s publishing department, Logos Press Engine. The site will serve as a vehicle through which we nurture and advance the network state narrative as it picks up steam. Learn more about the motives behind the LPE here.
Waku
Waku is a suite of modular protocols built for generalised, privacy-preserving communication. It provides the messaging layer of the Logos tech stack, ensuring network state citizens and technologies can share data with one another without fear of surveillance.
Already in production and adopted by users like the private messaging super-app Status, the Ethereum-based private transaction system Railgun, and other principle-driven applications, Waku is the most advanced of Logos’ infrastructure stack in development terms. Having proved its efficacy on a small scale, Waku’s primary goal for 2023 is to securely support more than one million users while encouraging wider adoption and ecosystem growth.
Waku accomplishments
Waku has recently delivered software solutions to enable the support of at least 10,000 active users. The team is now focused on pushing the limit to a million users through the design of new protocols. For each step, large scale simulations will back up the theoretical analysis undertaken, the next of which involves running a single GossipSub network with 10,000 nodes. To reach the scale required to support Status and other web3 applications requiring decentralised, off-chain communication, Waku will be composed of several of these networks.
Waku community building
Beyond scaling, the team continues to nurture a strong builder community around its communications protocols. Further updates to Waku’s documentation site mentor developers through integrating Waku in a variety of DApps. Additionally, the team is working on a whitepaper to define the network formally.
August also saw the team present Waku at Web3 Conference India and co-host two side events with Obscuro and Hyperlane during the four-day get together in Goa. All three were well attended, attracting more than 300 attendees. Next are presentations on leveraging Waku for decentralised communications in multi-party computation with Silence Laboratories at Decompute 2023 on 13 Sept. and an overview of Waku at ETHSafari in Kenya later the same month.
Codex
Codex is the storage and archiving layer of the Logos tech stack. Once launched, it will provide extremely high data durability guarantees, guarding the archive to ensure only those maintaining network state records control it. Codex is designed specifically to prevent data loss in adversarial conditions and leverages a robust combination of technologies to remain efficient and cost-effective while doing so.
Codex accomplishments
Currently, Codex’s development efforts focus primarily on its second proof of concept client, codenamed Scimitar, for which work on the zero-knowledge proving scheme required to engineer a viable storage marketplace remains. Meanwhile, development continues on other components needed for a third proof of concept before the v1 release in 2024, including various data discovery optimisations and proof aggregation elements for a prototype of a zero-knowledge remote auditing scheme.
Central to Codex’s data durability guarantees is the ability to efficiently sample data stored by nodes across the network to ensure its availability for retrieval. The problem is not a trivial one, as anyone who has followed the Ethereum Foundation’s data availability sampling research will understand. Consequently, Codex is currently engaged in DAS research alongside the EF, with the aid of a grant received earlier this year.
Codex community building
Although the team is heads-down building the first version of Codex, core contributors have been raising awareness about Codex within the cryptocurrency sphere and beyond it. The team rounded off August by speaking at KademliaCon, which followed The Science of Blockchain Conference at Stanford University. Codex core contributor Csaba Kiraly delivered a presentation titled ‘Transforming Kademlia code to large-scale DAS simulation’ alongside talks from representatives of the Ethereum Foundation, BitTorrent, Protocol Labs, Celestia, and others.
Before Codex’s involvement with The Birth of a Network State and Dmitriy’s Logos X Space appearance, core contributor Leonardo Bautista-Gomez presented on design choices in DAS at EDCON 2023 in June, and Csaba spoke for ETHZurich on DAS from the networking perspective.
Nomos
Nomos is the consensus and trustless agreements layer of the Logos tech stack. When in production, it will lay the foundations upon which aspiring network states, like Logos itself, can deploy sovereign governing, financial, and social services that reflect their citizens’ values more fully than those mandated by the nation-state system. Privacy-enhancing mechanisms are consistent throughout the network’s design to protect all participants, from the validator level up.
Nomos accomplishments
Nomos is a massive technical undertaking that combines numerous novel cryptographic techniques. As such, it is still in the very early stages of development.
The team is currently drafting two whitepapers: the first provides an overview of the network’s proposed architecture and the second is dedicated to the privacy-enhancing techniques used throughout to ensure the protection of user rights through absolute neutrality. Beyond formally defining Nomos’ design in these documents, the team is exploring options for the network’s base layer architecture while analysis of the Nomos node prototype’s performance at progressively larger scales through network simulations is ongoing.
The design space Nomos will inhabit is uncharted and the network must uphold a specific set of principles regarding user privacy and sovereignty, meaning unanticipated issues frequently arise. What’s more, the team is still small, complicating the roadmapping process further. However, future editions of ‘The State of the Logos Network’ will provide updates on expected delivery dates for objectives mentioned – such as the publishing of the two whitepapers currently in progress – and those still to be defined.
Vac
Vac is central to the research and development efforts of the Logos collective. The team studies problems at the cutting edge of distributed systems, blockchain technology, and ZK-proofs in the open for the benefit of the Logos and wider decentralised web movements. Vac’s focuses emerge from the Logos collective’s guiding principles: liberty, censorship resistance, security, privacy, transparency, openness, decentralisation, inclusivity, continuance, and resourcefulness.
Although Vac consists of various subgroups – Deep Research, R&D Service Units, Incubator Projects, and the RFC Unit – there is close collaboration between sets of subgroups. Currently, Vac Deep Research is studying the following broad areas: zero-knowledge proof systems, validator privacy, and Libp2p GossipSub improvements. The unit’s efforts support the entire Logos ecosystem directly and via Vac’s Service Units. Furthermore, its work has spawned incubator projects such as a zero-knowledge virtual machine for privacy-preserving computing.
Vac accomplishments
A recent significant achievement of Vac’s was the publication of a paper detailing Nescience – a zero knowledge virtual machine designed to provide a user experience similar to contemporary public blockchains but with robust privacy features. The post, authored by Moudy Ellaz, a Vac zkVM research engineer, outlines our progress toward a privacy-preserving, general-purpose execution environment.
Another notable accomplishment of late was Vac’s P2P Service Unit’s announcement of the completion of a major milestone with the release of improvements to the Nim libp2p implementation it maintains. All necessary optimisations in preparation for Ethereum’s forthcoming EIP-4844 upgrade are now complete. Meanwhile, the group’s Applied Cryptography and ZK Service Unit released Zerokit v0.3.1 – a set of Rust zero-knowledge modules – and work is underway on a subsequent v4 release. Alongside this, the ACZ unit continues to optimise RLNP2P to ensure Waku is production ready.
The Distributed Systems Testing Service Unit is currently undertaking network analysis on Waku, Codex, and Status, and has recently completed a technical report titled ‘Scaling the Waku Protocol: A Performance Analysis with Wakurtosis’ and is now drafting an accompanying blog post to break down its findings. The Smart Contracts and RFC Service Units are primarily supporting Status ahead of its major upcoming upgrade. The former has been preparing Community contracts and SNT staking contracts while the RFC Unit is updating Status specifications. Concurrently, the Tokenomics Service Unit is also involved with the Status app upgrade while undertaking economic analysis of Waku, Nomos, and Codex.
Vac Deep Research is working on validator privacy; GossipSub improvements; Carnot, the proposed consensus mechanism for Nomos; and bribery attacks against consensus mechanisms – particularly Carnot. Additionally, the department is writing a paper to define Carnot, and developing a Tor Push integration for the Ethereum consensus client Nimbus.
Join the movement
With The Birth of a Network State lighting the Logos torch, we are keen to connect with individuals willing and able to help us put our ideas into practice.
Join the network state discussion on Discord.
Easton
Logos
Sterlin Lujan
Anon
Corey Petty