IOG Catalyst Team: Goals for the project, validation, and feasibility?

The overarching goal of the project is to improve Catalyst, increase user based, increase Features and performance.

The main goals to realize this are as follows:

1. Deliver “Hermes,” a blockchain and event processing service

2. Deliver “Athena”, a hyper-lite voting client

To evaluate the primary hypothesis that DApps can be built from a core of Web3 components such as blockchain interfaces and decentralized peer to peer networks, very rough but functional tests have already been conducted by the Catalyst Team. This has shown it is possible and within the current capabilities of WebAssembly (WASM) to build robust and secure business logic, so that the logic required to deliver Athena can be delivered.

During these feasibility tests, Hermes architecture was demonstrably capable of the following:

1. A simple single tasking WASM runtime which could run two pre-defined WASM modules.

2. When implemented:

   1. A very simple Cardano blockchain follower for a local node, which could send block events to WASM runtime.

   2. An interface to the Ethereum RPC protocol to allow us to simulate following the Ethereum blockchain.

   3. Simulated API’s for posting data to:

      1. A Pub/Sub network running on IPFS.

      2. A HTTP endpoint that simulated a twitter API.

3. One WASM module received events from the Cardano Blockchain, and called the Pub/Sub API to post a message to the channel advising what block# it had been received.

4. To better test the Pub/Sub API the IPFS Command line client was called to post the data to a distributed Pub/Sub network so that this could be remotely verified with readily available tools.

5. The simulated twitter API just logged to the console from the running node.

GOAL 1: The Hermes MVP capabilities will deliver:

• Fully-integrated bridging to blockchains at the node level to the Cardano network without requiring a locally running node.

  • It may optionally use a local node if one exists but will be fully functional without it.

• Peer to Peer (P2P) networking for Data and File Exchange.

  • Reusable protocols for trustless data verification over the P2P network.

  • Project Catalyst Voting DApp will only need to decide what it needs to communicate and how it can validate that information is accurate.

• A system of trust placed in the hands of individual catalyst voters running Hermes.

  • The individual voter decides what Voting Events and data sources they trust and Hermes and Athena can verify that the data they receive from the Catalyst Fund Operator is trustworthy to the voter.

  • Allows independent operators to run multiple Project Catalyst-style voting events.

GOAL 2: Deliver Athena functionality to enable real-time responses to Cardano Blockchain events and Catalyst Fund data distribution via IPFS/LibP2P, enabling:

• Timely detection, validation, and import of Voter Registrations as they appear on the Cardano blockchain.

• Continuous tracking of voting power for voter registrations posted on Cardano.

• Capability to distribute an authoritative source of truth about the Project Catalyst voting events and synchronize that data from the distributed peers.

• A locally run UX that can display event and registration data, and also cast votes across the peer network, and validate that those votes are accurately recorded.