Possible Future Work
Potential community initiatives for AnteV1 and beyond.
The below are examples of work that we hope our community may explore in the future:
Additional Collateral Support
We imagine common ERC20s make sense to consider as valid collateral for staking and challenging.
Community-Generated Test Lists
We imagine that due to the permissionless open nature of the AntePoolFactory, ill-intentioned participants may create AntePool instances that point to an intentionally faulty Ante Test.
Thus, we believe it is important to introduce some variant of a "Blue Check" or a "Curated List" of Ante Tests that are known to be well-intentioned (or written by accountable authors). The initial versions of these curated test lists may be community-generated or involve community voting.
ZK Proof-of-Exploit
We think it may be tractable to introduce future Ante Tests that offer checkAndFreeze(zkp) functionality. Specifically, we imagine challengers passing in a zero knowledge proof-of-specific-exploit (a generalized exploit-prover is out of scope of Ante, but specific invariant failures, like "x can be made < y" may be tractable), which then freezes an Ante Template.
(An Ante Template would be a smart contract framework new teams could build off of where, if a checkAndFreeze() returns True in a linked Ante Test, all functionality except for emergencyWithdraw() is locked.)
Design Sketch
As of May 2021, we don't think full generalized zero-knowledge proof-of-exploit generation is computationally tractable on the EVM, but in principle the following design could work:
Create a function which checks whether an invariant holds
Generate a Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) for the statement "I know a valid transaction which, when applied, causes the invariant check to return
False"The exact definitions of "know a valid transaction" and "when applied" depend on how much on-/off- chain introspection can be supported.
If there were no compute constraints, one could have the verifier check that you submitted a valid EVM tx
However, the actual design will have to make numerous tradeoffs to minimize the verification cost.
Alternatively, a combination with trusted Ante Arbiters could make this approach more practical.
Feasibility
The key question for the design sketch is what ZKP is verified on-chain, since off-chain proof generation can be scaled.
One concern could be that the verifier might need to change depending on the contract state, but that isn't necessarily the case, and depends on specific implementation details of the contract. Our proposal is not that different from a ZK-rollup design, where users submit transactions to the rollup validators, who generate validity proofs, which then go on-chain.
The key difference is be that in, Ante the transactions are "hypothetical," and hence don't actually modify the state. That said, it's a bold claim for the Ante Team to say this design will plug into the existing Ethereum Smart Contracts seamlessly, and there will undoubtedly be many subsequent details to has out, but we believe the design works in principle.
Web3 Extensibility
Ante intends to eventually extend support far beyond Ethereum and DeFi as core applications. Ante is a blockchain-agnostic protocol, and can support any generalized invariant in any Smart Contract system.
Note that certain design parameters (e.g. 6-block wait time for challengers to verify Ante Tests to prevent frontrunning) may need readjusting, as the threshold for submarine sends can vary depending on a chain's finality constraints.
Arbiters
Arbiters are on- and off-chain partially centralized "bridges" that act as a "specialized information oracle." An example could be detecting if a certain hash has been uploaded to a website, uploading a binding opinion on a specific definition of an exploit, or referencing broader events.
The advantage of an Ante Arbiter over e.g. a ChainLink oracle is that each Ante Arbiter could be a stand-alone entity that could be held accountable off-chain, a feature (not a bug!) for certain institutional participants and eventual legacy finance participants in DeFi.
Smart Assets
Smart Assets are a term Ante uses to refer to algorithmic digital assets that have been secured with Smart Tests. A simple example could include cDai wrapped with a corresponding continuous challenger stake in an AnteCompoundDai AntePool position. Ante believes that creating and popularizing Smart Assets will be one of many steps in bridging the worlds of DeFi and legacy finance.
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