QuantumTunnel

QuantumTunnel is a basic relayer developed to connect tendermint_light_client and substrate_light_client with any cosmos and substrate chain respectively. It can also be used to test either substrate_light_client or tendermint_light_client by simulating their target chains. Refer here to know how it works under the hood.

This application is authored using Abscissa, a Rust application framework.

Compilation

To build QuantumTunnel you need to have rust nightly toolchain installed. You can find instructions here. After you have nightly toolchain installed, just run: make build

Running

QuantumTunnel relies on json files to read chain connection configuration, passed by -c command line argument. QuantumTunnel can either connects to live chain or read simulation data from file and pass it to light client.

If we are connecting to live chain as opposed to read simulation data, you need to set following environment variables:

For Substrate live chain: SUBSTRATE_SIGNER_SEED=<your >= 12 words seed>

For Cosmos live chain: COSMOS_SIGNER_SEED=<your >= 12 words seed>

The test_data folder in the repository contains different type of configuration and simulation data for both cosmos and substrate chain. Each chain's configuration field in json can be of two forms: real or simulation. Let's take a look at an example configuration:

{
  "cosmos": {
    "real": {
      "chain_id": "testing",
      "rpc_addr": "http://localhost:26657/",
      "lcd_addr": "http://localhost:1317/",
      "trusting_period": "720h",
      "unbonding_period": "721h",
      "max_clock_drift": "30s",
      "wasm_id": 1,
      "gas": 90000000,
      "gas_price": "0.25stake",
      "default_denom": "stake"
    }
  },
  "substrate": {
    "simulation": {
      "simulation_file_path": "test_data/substrate_light_client_simulated_2.txt",
      "should_run_till_height": 7
    }
  }
}

In this example, QuantumTunnel will connect to a real cosmos chain exposing rpc interface at port 26657, but on substrate side it will read headers from the file substrate_light_client_simulated_2.txt. This config implies to QuantumTunnel that we want to test substrate_light_client running on cosmos chain with simulation data contained in substrate_light_client_simulated_2.txt and the simulation will be considered success only if the substrate_light_client will run till height 7. This feature is useful to test light client against invalid header sequence. If the simulation is successful quantum tunnel will exit with zero, otherwise it will panic and exit with non-zero status code.

How it works?

Quantum tunnel is asynchronus application relies on tokio to handle four tasks, which communicates with each other using crossbeam channels:

1. Cosmos send handler: Receives substrate header data from Substrate receive handler and send them to substrate light client running inside the cosmos chain.
2. Cosmos receive handler: Receives new headers from cosmos blockchain or simulation file and send them to Substrate send handler.
3. Substrate send handler: Receives new cosmos headers from Cosmos receive handler and send them to cosmos light client running inside the substrate chain.
4. Substrate receive handler: Receives new headers from substrate blockchain or simulation file and send them to Cosmos send handler.

Each side's handlers can start in one of the two modes:

• Simulation mode: In simulation mode, receive handler reads header data from file instead of querying live chain and also keeps track of how many blocks has been consumed by opposite chain's send handler to determine result of the simulation. send handler in simulation mode just drains header data sent by opposite chain's receive handler, to prevent crossbeam channel to accumulate large number of unsent data. At max only one chain's handlers can run in simulation mode.
• Real mode: In real mode, receive handler reads header data from live chain and pass it to opposite chain's send handler, which formats it and sends it to light client running in its chain.