The state of Gossamer November - December

[P1sar]

Highlights

JAM0 and Sub0 conferences and Gossamer offsite

In November, our team traveled to Thailand to attend the Sub0 and JAM0 conferences. JAM0 provided an excellent platform for us to engage with other teams working on the implementation of the JAM protocol. We had productive discussions on advancing the implementation, submitting milestones, and establishing methodologies for comparing results beyond the JAM test vectors.

During the offsite event, we combined productive brainstorming sessions with some enjoyable moments. We explored the future direction of Gossamer and the JAM protocol while also starting to formulate ideas for additional projects that could leverage our expertise beyond the JAM protocol implementation. Although these ideas are still in the early stages, we look forward to sharing more details as they evolve.

Development

Sync

We have completed regression tests for our WARP sync implementation and consider it as working correctly. Proceeding with sync we worked on the State sync strategy that is almost complete but still requires regression testing on the Paseo and Westend networks. The State sync strategy begins executing upon completion of WARP sync. When WARP sync has gotten all of the fragments and finished executing, the State sync protocol requests and imports the latest chain state.

Polkadot Storage

We have finilised most of the work related to StateDB performance optimisation that we have been working on almost a whole year. Next upcoming goals are integrating it in to the gossamer node codebase and benchmarking the results of the optimisation.

Polkadot Parachain protocol implementation

Over the past two months, we have been focused on designing and estimating the remaining changes needed to implement the parachain protocol in a way that allows us to propose a block. We consider to share this roadmap to the general public in the begining of 2025.

• We have implemented Fragment Chain as part of Prospective Parachains subsystem that is necessary for Async Backing

Improvements and bug fixes

• Numerous bugs fixed that were found during regression testing of syncing with Paseo and Westend. These syncing issues have arisen primarily due to introduced regressions with regards to how we verify GRANDPA justifications, as well as iterate through the storage trie.

JAM protocol implementation

• We have implemented the recent block history state transition function to prevent duplicate work reports as described in section 7 of the Gray Paper.
• Fisher-Yates Shuffling Function that is described in Appendix F of the Gray Paper has also been implemented.
• Implementing the Pending Reports portion of the state transition is a work in progress.

Product

As mentioned earlier, our current focus is on delivering the commitments outlined in our treasury proposal for Gossamer, while simultaneously advancing our efforts around the JAM protocol and its associated tooling. While these initiatives are still in their early stages, we look forward to sharing further updates as they progress.

In addition, we are actively working to attract more open source contributors to the Gossamer project, and to have a broader reach within the Polkadot ecosystem. Stay tuned for more details on these efforts in the near future.