Weekly Dev Update #63

THORChain

2020-10-06 — 3 min read

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THORChain Weekly Dev Update for Week 63, 29 Sep — 05 Oct; Multi-asgards, Liquidity Assets, Midgard V0.2, Bitcoin implementation ongoing.

Summary

The team rotated to focus on Bitcoin, as well as THORChain feature roadmap.

Multi-Asgards

The current limit to the number of nodes on Chaosnet is TSS committee sizes. The team expected committees of 20/30 nodes to take 1 minute to sign TSS, so set that as a limit. In practise, it has been found that on Chaosnet, most TSS signing speeds are 8–10 seconds, probably due to the large number of nodes on AWS infra, based in the US. While a point of concern (centralisation around one service provider), the team are pleased to see that TSS in general performs better than expected. The team may increase the desired validator set to beyond 30, but it certainly isn’t feasible to maintain this growth up to 100+ nodes, so the team have an alternative solution: Multi-Asgards.

This feature will shard the main Asgard vault into two vaults of 16 nodes, the moment it crosses 31 nodes. These two Asgard vaults then alternate between receiving funds such that they grow in size together, as well as churning in such a way that both vaults stay the same size in number of nodes. If two vaults drops below 15 nodes, it will merge into a single vault on the next churn. This can then continue indefinitely, tolerating any number of TSS nodes, both up and down.

This now removes TSS signing committee limits from stopping THORChain from scaling, and the next theoretical limit is around 250 nodes, which is the Tendermint theoretical limit.

Liquidity Assets

With a native chain with native assets, THORChain can now issue liquidity assets for pool shares, designated as THOR.lBTC-BTC as an example. Liquidity assets are transferable, and they are also valuable, so like native assets, can pay gas in-kind. The value of a liquidity asset (in RUNE) is the instantaneous claim on the RUNE depth * 2, of the associated pool.