Layer 2 Scaling
This document outlays an approach to bridging considerations for committing baseline proofs managed across workgoups to the mainnet.
- 1.Baseline proof verification on the mainnet is a gas intensive process owing to the complexity in computing the verification against the pairing library.
- 2.Furthermore, there is an added cost of gas to verify the set membership of the document hash in the Shield contract on the mainnet.
- 3.Enterprises typically have over millions of internal processes, that would be baselined, and it is not feasible to verify every baseline proof on the mainnet.
- 4.Transactions on the mainnet have intrinsic economic value to indicate the processes' value, transactability/transferability and prevent double spending.
- 5.While individual baseline proofs need not necessarily have 1:1 correspondence on the mainnet, they can still be represented as a composite transaction on the mainnet.
To scale baseline protocol across multiple participants on the mainnet, there are several criteria to be considered:
- Usability: Ease of use/access to baseline proofs for a given organization and a given process/workflow step.
- Throughput: Ability to process or record a high volume of steps.
- Finality: Finality of the transaction on the mainnet.
- Security: Usage of privacy and hiding of critical data.
- Decentralization: Degree to which the steps need to be validated by a wide variety of participants.
- Updates: Ability to update existing steps in view of changes to an organization's internal processes.
Rank ordering, with "Crucial" indicating absolutely necessary criterion and "Important" indicating essential but not a driving consideration for baselining enterprise systems, below is a scalability matrix of the above criteria:
Criterion | Crucial | Important |
---|---|---|
Usability | | Y |
Throughput | Y | |
Finality | Y | |
Security | Y | |
Decentralization | | Y |
Updates | Y | |
- 1.Problem of workgroup interaction scales with a complexity of O(n^2).
- 2.Workgroup identification and tracking membership is local to each "workgroup" instance.
- 3.Scaling concerns grow with addition of L2's and proving membership in a particular network. Any L2 protocol basis for running baseline workgroups away from the mainnet have membership concerns.

Workgroup Challenges
- 1.Any local step of a workgroup can be "materialized" into a token transaction on the mainnet.
- 2.Determine exit or trigger conditions for exiting a process
- 3.Upload a "composite" proof to be used by all workgroups to a Merkle Tree Set on the mainnet.
- 4.Anchor signatures and timestamp deltas for offchain consensus, as inputs to a wrapped rollup (R1CS) circuit.
- 5.Verify wrapped proof contents and transfer token from one workgroup to another (tied to verifying entry criteria for the target workgroup)

Bridging Workflow
- Involves setting up a registration and de-registration mechanism (under constraints of privacy), using “commitments” and “nullifiers”.
- Proving membership in a workgroup by computing new roots and leaves of the Merkle tree, aka “committing” a state(IBaselineRPC.track()).
- Update/Delete of state corresponds to re-computing the roots and leaves, aka “re-committing” and “nullifying” a state(IBaselineRPC.getTracked(), verify())
- Nullifiers are typically used in the context of “spending” commitments. To nullify is to reveal or “exit” out of a state of commitment (IBaselineRPC.trackNullifier()**) Example: Terms have been met, payment can be issued
- Nullifiers managed as a tracker of shield contract, which in of itself is a separate Merkle tree represents verified de-registration (IBaselineRPC.getTrackedNullifier()**, verify())

Brigding Workflow Design
- 1.Layer 2 protocols can be used to scale baseline proofs and leverage recursive proof generations to compose/batch baseline proofs.
- 2.The composition depicted in the above design assumes a simpler protoocol proof, that is common to any baseline participant to verify BLS signatures of workgroup proofs.
- 3.Each of the workgroup proofs are created with R1CS circuits, custom and specific to the particular workgroup.
- 4.The workgroup proof itself is a composition of proofs and the above scheme depicts a simple zk-rollup proof, leveraging gnark as the privacy provider.
- 5.Using standardized interfaces for Shield and RShield to represent accumulators of commitments and nullifiers, cross chain state can be synchronized to the mainnet.
- 6.Synchronization to the mainnet, is pre-supposed on the exit condition of signed proofs and can be represented as a trigger for minting token to the mainnet participants.
- 7.Verifier interface on the mainnet can be defined based on the type of composition and pairing elliptic curve configured for zk-rollup.
- 1.Overall baseline protocol proof can be extended to be a multi-sign verification R!CS circuit.
- 2.Composition scheme can be extended or generalized to work with zk-zkrollups and plonk rollup schemes within the context of enabling privacy using zk-snarks.
- 3.Extensions to use other zkp techniques such as zk-starks, bulletproofs, etc.
- 4.Using bilinear accumulators in place of Merkle trees for set membership proofs.
- 1.Kartheek Solipuram (@skarred14)
- 2.Kyle Thomas (@kthomas)
- 3.Lucas Rodriguez (@LucasRodriguez)
Last modified 10mo ago