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Petr Korolev edited this page Jul 21, 2019 · 3 revisions

Welcome to the Ignis wiki!

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FAQ Matter Network (formerly Ignis wallet)

Functional

Q: How long do I wait for something to happen? A: Current block size is 8, so there must be 8 transactions from you or anybody else for transfers to work. Once the block of 8 is full, the block will be committed and you'll see pending change in the balance.

Q: What size of block will be in production? A: In production will be up to 1600 transactions into one onchain ttx.

Q: What difference between "Partial withdrawal" and "Full exit"? A: Partial withdrawal is a transfer under the hood. Full exit trigger a separate full block. Basically this is condensing 8 txs into one onchain ttx.

Q: I've done a partial withdrawal. Is anything meant to happen? A: Becouse Partial withdrawal is a transfer under the hood. So Balances will be updated once the block of 8 transactions is full and verified.

Q: I made 8 txs to the test address, where do I see them? A: We don't have a block explorer yet, unfortunately. But if you register another account and send some ETH there, you will see its balance increase.

Q: So you'd have to wait for 8 (1600 in production) tx before the screen does anything or is that just a UI thing? A: That's a UI thing, it can be padded. Users will wait very limited time. The whole system makes most sense under high load, otherwise you could simply use normal ETH transactions.

Q: How many transactions can a block handle?
A: 1600, optimizations on the way to push it up. Also with some tricks we can reduce verification costs.

Under the hood

Q: What happens in the Ignis wallet at a high level?
A: At a high level, you're basically depositiing funds to the smart contract, and then the smart contract keeps account of transactions thourhg zk snarks. The proof is sent to the main contract on the main ethereum blockchain. So the confirmation on the main net is equal to confirmation on the sidechain.

Q: How exactly is this Plasma? A: It's Plasma in the following sense: it's a scaling solution, in which sidechain blocks are cryptographically committed to the mainchain. Thus sidechain operators can not arbitrarily mess with the block content. Differences are: on the upside, verification by SNARKs instead of users; on the downside, data availability is YET not solved offchain (though the data availability cost is an order of magnitude better in terms of gas).

Q: Wouldn't it be a lot cheaper here tho? A: Block verification costs 600k gas atm, so it becomes cheaper if you have at least 40 transactions in a block. In production it wiil be 375 gas per transaction plus the onchain part ( slightly over 600).

Q: You don't have to bbe online or anything, right? A: Not at all. EVM takes care of the verification, operator(s) can not cheat.

Q: Can transactions be private?
A: This might be possible in the future, but not now, since the transaction data is posted onchain. Privacy would make transaction cost much higher.

Q: So how is this different from AZTEC A: Take a look at the gas costs of AZTEC transactions under that link.

Q: How would this be affectted by storage rent do you know?
A: Not at all: we take minimal use of storage. Constant amount of variables in the contract, regardless of the load or number of accounts.

Q: What's the difficult part is the SNARK circuits?
A: The circuits themselves must be thoroughly audited by highly competent cryptographers. If you want to better understand SNARKs, take a look at Vitalik's blog post series, they are brilliant.

Q: In regards to the trustted set-up, I thought that was relevant just for privacy?
A: Trusted Setup is the ugly part here. It is required to make SNARKs work in general.

Q: So you can mess up eth ownership if it's not set-up correctly? You need just one key to be destroyed though?
A: If ALL AND EVERY of the trusted setup participants collude together, they could fake any proof and steal ETH If at least one party is honest, everything is fine.

Q: Has Buterin been involved with this project?
A: So we there's a big ceremony with, let's say, Buterin, Consensys, AMD, etc. etc., then it would become very trustworthy for us. So this is an open question yet

Q: This project was supported by an Ethereum Foundation grant? A: We (Matter Inc) are bootstrapping Plasma from our own funds now. We work close with Ethereum Foundation.

Q: They seem to be a start-up focused solely on this. VC backed do you know or grants? A: We work close with Ethereum Foundation. We are hoping to continue developing with grant support.

Q: Would specialized snarks hardware apply here?
A: Yes, exactly. This hardware is capable to push the cost per transaction way down. And to make the latency lower. But right now there is no final accepted solution what elliptic curve (for snarks) and type of fields will be used and available for such zero-knowledge proofs in public blockchains. So ASICS of some form are not yet economically reasonable due to uncertainty and high development cost and required time. There are other less-uncertain ways to improve proof generation efficiency and we exploit those various options already.

Q: Does this plasma implementation support erc-20 tokens or just eth?
A: Current version is just PoC with ETH only. We're planning to have an ERC-20 version too.

Q: How do the deposits get added to the tree? How deep is the tree at its deepest? A: Tree height is 24 atm. Deposits have a separate SNARK block of 1 tx. Everything is very close to the rollup spec.

Q: The eth is in the smart conntract, so I suppose it could be hacked and drainedd? Are you using any sort of fail-safe mechanism lets say?
A: Obviously everything will be open-sourced and meticulously audited before going into production.

Q: When do you hope to go into production?
A: As with any smart contract, there is a risk of a bug which can be exploited. In our case, the contracts are the less risky part though, because they are relatively small. The more difficult part is the SNARK circuits Besides, we will have to conduct a Trusted Setup ceremony (similar to the Powers of Tau in zcash). This is a tricky part and we will write separately about it. We can not comment on the launch on mainnet yet. All we can say is that we don't have any big uncertainties now, it's a matter of Engineering.

Q: I am looking to get some more technical details on how this works. How do the deposits get added to the tree? How deep is the tree at its deepest? A: Tree height is 24 atm Deposits have a separate SNARK block of 1 tx. Everything is very close to the rollup spec

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