snarsma-mvp

Our submission for ETH Singapore 2018

Motivation

We had planned to implement a simple version of an Ethereum sidechain based on zk-snarks. This sidechain would improve scalability by batching transactions into one snark proof to be validated on-chain. In theory, the performance costs of validating n transactions via a snark proof would be far lower than performing those n transactions on-chain. Additionally, the cryptographic security of snark proofs would eliminate the need for challenge mechanisms found in Plasma sidechain designs.

Our plan for the hackathon was to make the sidechain as simple as possible. It was based on barryWhitehat's roll_up specification and would only perform ETH transfers.

One significant motivation for picking this challenge was that the circomlib and snarkjs libraries by iden3 seemed mature and feature-complete enough for this task. In particular, circomlib came packaged with EdDSA signature validation, a Pederson snark-friendly hash function, and various bit manipulation components.

Ultimately, we did not complete a functioning demo, but implemented the following components:

• off-chain Merkle proof generation and validation, as well as state transition logic
• off-chain database which stores transactions and serves queries from an operator
• a zk-snark circuit that validates signed sidechain transactions

The piece whose implementation time and energy cost we had underestimated the most was the zk-snark circuit for validating a Merkle proof.

Nevertheless, we each learned a lot from this exercise and we plan to keep working on this project.

Demo

Clone this repo and install dependencies by running npm install. Run tsc --watch to get all our Typescript running

Sending transactions and performing state transitions

Set up your database:

• create an empty directory on your machine
• initialise your db with mongod --dbpath path/to/dir

Send transactions:

• from build/user run node userTest.js to send a deposit, transfer, and withdraw transaction to your database

Process transactions:

• from build/operator run node operatorTest.js to pick up these transactions from your database and update your Merkle root accordingly

Verifying eddsa signatures in the snark circuit

• Download jest (npm i jest) if you do not already have it.
• Run jest Verify to run a circuit which checks EdDSA-signed transactions.