IOG Catalyst Team: Catalyst Ecosystem Accelerator - Proposed solution

Problem:

Richness of Catalyst Experience needs to be improved

Solution:

Improve Catalyst Infrastructure to improve user benefits across feature richness, inclusivity & speed

Proposal deliverables:

Hermes: High-Availability Blockchain Voting Database

Athena: High-Speed Accessible Voting DApp

The key delivery goals are:

• Performance

• Inclusivity

• Experience richness

• Parallelism

'Hermes' will be a high-availability blockchain voting database which will act as a distributed storage and event processor for voting events, proposals, and persona actions from the responsive user interface ‘Athena’

Hermes addresses the key issues of :

• Performance - deliver responsive system scaling to multiple proposals

• Parallelism - multiple events in parallel

• Inclusivity - wider engagement with community with more events

• Reduced event latency

Key components of Hermes:

• Proposals service

• Committee service

• Event based service

• Voting event service

• Proposal Submission and Review service

• Voting Committees, Key exchange, and independent committee-based tally decryption to be decentralized.

• Community or Committee-based events.

• Parallel and Independent voting events with unique parameter sets, operated by multiple groups

• Event data publishing

• Distribution of votes

• Voting Event verifier

• Ballot box module

• Privacy preservation

• Blockchain

Issues in current system which Hermes will address:

• The current Single Node Blockchain (Jourmangandr) is not scalable and its data is not durable past the current voting event. CEA will broadcast from the Voting Interface using the local node and propagate to other nodes

• The existing system does not allow multiple events to progress in parallel. The new system would allow multiple voting events to progress in parallel, using the same Voting UI but connected to a different voting event

Athena addresses the Experience Richness of the current Catalyst voting app by providing:

• Proposal Submission and Review accessible via decentralized App where multiple proposals can be executed in parallel

• Voting Committees, Key exchange, and independent committee-based tally decryption to be decentralized thereby parallelized

• Community or Committee-based event setting.

• Parallel and Independent voting events with unique parameter sets, operated by multiple groups

Key components of Athena:

• Event data publishing component

  • Event data publishing will allow voting data to be distributed thereby creating a distributed and durable ledger/ blockchain

• Voter registration component

  • Capture users for vote onboarding and ensure smooth user experience

• Voting power component

  • Provide a rich user experience and show voting power remaining per voting event to the user

• Ballot box component

  • Create a mechanism where users vote is propagated through from voting users node/instance and ledger to other users on the network.

  • Deliver a reliable network of nodes depending on the number of users on the network

• Blockchain

  • The blockchain is achieved by the propagation of events through the network and persistence onto nodes of other users.

• Privacy preservation - using security standards of p2pLib we ensure privacy is maintained.

Key functions of Athena:

• Voters can retrieve and view details of the current Catalyst fund.

• The ability to read details about each category and proposal in the fund.

• Register as a voter using Wallet Connect (with supported wallets).

• Check on-chain voter registration

• Check voting power independently

• Select Proposals in a Challenge and cast votes

What are the key Blockchain properties? Does this solution constitute this?

• Decentralization - Yes - each node is connected by Cardano relay node

• Immutability - Yes - each record is written once and published

• Transparency - Yes - visibility of each node

• Security - Yes - libP2P

• Consensus - Yes

• Persistence - Yes - copy of voting data is distributed to each node

• Scalability - Yes - more node added it scales

Success Factors:

• Speed achieved in moving from web2 to Blockchain, measured by service uptime, data durability, able to vote outside web2 hardware

• Increased Features - parity with existing Catalyst with additional depth of features based on data availability and additional events coverage

• Inclusivity

  • Ability to cater for prior levels and new simulated loads relating to multiple events and proposals

  • Ability to ensure existing Catalyst data load preserved, whilst proving augmentation of parallel event data is equally scalable