Task: Refactor DKG and resharing

[yiannisbot]

eta: 2023-03-31

description: The current implementation of the Distributed Key Generation used in drand has served us well for the initial stages of the drand service and growth, but cannot support our plans for expansion of the League of Entropy, or async and more frequent resharing ceremonies. A refactored DKG with simpler and more straightforward CLI interactions can make the operator’s job easier.
Example challenges we’ve identified include:

• nodes restarting during a resharing ceremony end up in the wrong state and effectively block the DKG from completing
• some messages are sent in sync, but some others are gossiped, which results in some of them being delayed and makes things difficult to monitor and debug.

Apart from implementing the features to deal with the above-mentioned challenges, successful completion of this Milestone will be marked by async mainnet ceremonies.

You can read the DKG specification in this Notion doc: DKGv2 Spec.

[AnomalRoil]

Proposition:

• add a new milestone "drand v2" in the Maintenance theme
• have this DKG milestone fall under that as a child so that we can close it now that it's merged in develop
• add the "unified gossiping mechanism" to it as child too
• add "Refactor public APIs" to it as a child too
• add "release v2" as the last child milestone

[yiannisbot]

@AnomalRoil agreed on the proposition, which is done now: #30.

I have not included "unified gossiping" as part of it, as this is a task that requires significant amount of work (in the order of a couple of months) and I'm not sure we'll be able to find time for this. If we wanted to have it, we should have included it in the initial roadmap. As things stand now, we'll have to drop something else and I don't see what can be dropped. If we have suggestions, we need to bring them forward and make a decision with the team and leadership.

[yiannisbot]

Regarding closing this issue: I'm not opposed, but we haven't done any testing on the refactoring. We should either keep this open until we have testing done, or add a separate task on the testing of the refactored DKG.