Status Update From the Spacemesh Research Team 🚀🚀
🔥 Athena VM Technical Specification 🔥
🔷 Continuous work to define Athena roles (spacemesh.io/blog/introduci…). Here’s a sneak peek:
- Relay responsible for:
🔸 Pre-validation of Transactions
🔸 Compatibility with L1and Submission to L1
🔸 Fee Management: Handles two types of fees: one for the relay itself and another for execution, covering costs like L1 storage.
- L1 Miner responsible for:
🔸 Block Production
🔸 Handling Rollup Transactions: Manages bundles produced by relays, extracting and deduplicating Athena transactions.
🔸 Verify relay signatures and Incorporation into Blocks using the Hare mechanism
- Executor responsible for:
🔸 State Management: Maintains Athena state, executing transactions
🔸 Consensus and Rewards
🔸 Dispute Resolution
🔷 Preliminary research
🔸 The preliminary research phase is complete. This phase included a deep dive on various VM designs and related tooling, and zkVMs including RISC-V-based zkVMs RiscZero and SP1.
🔸 We’re confident in our proposed design and as far as we’re aware Athena is the first and only attempt to build a blockchain VM that plus into existing, mainstream compiler tooling (Rust, LLVM, RISC-V) that runs efficiently at near-native speeds and also natively targets a RISC-V zkVM circuit meaning that proving will also be efficient.
🔸 For more information on what’s been done so far and the next steps please see this update: athenavm.github.io/athena/update/…
🔷 Low-Level Design
🔸 This encompasses the detailed aspects of system architecture, including programming languages, SDKs, core architecture details like word size and register count, and instruction sets.
🔸 It also covers system calls, I/O operations, bytecode formats, as well as the entire compilation, interpretation, and execution processes including smart contract verification, gas metering, and benchmarking.
🔸 Additionally, it includes pre-compiles and the handling of cross-contract calls and the call stack.
🔷 High-Level Design:
🔸 Introduces abstraction of the low-level VM design. See here: community.spacemesh.io/t/succint-proo…
🔸 Focuses on designing the account model, and the storage and permissioning of code and state, potentially incorporating advanced concepts like account abstraction and resources management.
🔥 ATX Merge Specification 🔥
🔷 Efforts are underway to finalize the implementation of ATX merge V1. See proposal here: github.com/spacemeshos/go…
🔷 Version 1 (V1) incorporates the following features:
🔸 The inclusion of a certificate within the ATX that covers multiple posts.
🔸 Any ATX containing multiple posts is required to also include a 32-byte ID.
🔸 This 32-byte ID serves as a reference to another ATX that contains the actual marriage certificate.
🔸 There is a limitation of one marriage per set.
🔷 Version 2 (V2) is planned to expand upon these capabilities, introducing additional features such as:
🔸 Allowing more than one marriage per set.
🔸 Subset merges
🔸 Merge announcements.
