Optics

OPTimistic Interchain Communication

Overview

Optics is a cross-chain communication system. It handles passing raw buffers between blockchains cheaply, and with minimal fuss. Like IBC and other cross-chain communication systems, Optics creates channels between chains, and then passes its messages over the channel. Once a channel is established, any application on the chain can use it to send messages to any other chain.

Compared to IBC and PoS light client based cross-chain communication, Optics has weaker security guarantees, and a longer latency period. However, Optics may be implemented on any smart contract chain, with no bespoke light client engineering. Because it does not run a light client, Optics does not spend extra gas verifying remote chain block headers.

In other words, Optics is designed to prioritize:

• Cost: No header verification or state management.
• Speed of implementation: Requires only simple smart contracts, no complex cryptography.
• Ease of use: Simple interface for maintaining XApp connections.

You can read more about Optics' architecture at Celo's main documentation site.

Integrating with Optics

Optics establishes communication channels with other chains, but it's up to XApp (pronounced "zap", and short for "cross-chain applications") developers to use those. This repo provides a standard pattern for integrating Optics channels, and ensuring that communication is safe and secure.

Integrations require a few key components:

• A Home and any number of Replica contracts deployed on the chain already. These contracts manage Optics communication channels. and will be used by the XApp to send and receive messages.

• A XAppConnectionManager (in solidity/optics-core/contracts). This contract connects the XApp to Optics by allowing the XApp admin to enroll new Home and Replica contracts. Enrolling and unenrolling channels is the primary way to ensure that your XApp handles messages correctly. XApps may deploy their own connection manager, or share one with other XApps.

• A Message library. Optics sends raw byte arrays between chains. The XApp must define a message specification that can be serialized for sending, and deserialized for handling on the remote chain

• A Router contract. The router translates between the Optics cross-chain message format, and the local chain's call contract. It also implements the business logic of the XApp. It exposes the user-facing interface, handles messages coming in from other chains, and dispatches messages being sent to other chains.

Solidity developers interested in implementing their own Message library and Router contract should check out the optics-XApps package. It contains several example XApps.

It is Strongly Recommended that XApp admins run a watcher daemon to maintain their XAppConnectionManager and guard from fraud. Please see the documentation in the rust/ directory and the Optics architecture documentation for more details.

Working on Optics

Pre-commit hooks

Set up your pre-commit hook:

echo "./pre-commit.sh" > .git/hooks/pre-commit
chmod +x .git/hooks/pre-commit

Note: In the event you need to bypass the pre-commit hooks, pass the --no-verify flag to your git commit command

Solidity

1. Install dependencies

   cd solidity/optics-core
   npm i
   cd ../optics-XApps
   npm i
   

2. Install jq

   brew install jq
   

     OR  

   sudo apt-get install jq
   

3. Install solhint

   npm install -g solhint
   // to check it is installed:
   solhint --version
   

Rust

• install rustup
  • link here
• see rust/README.md

What is Optics?

We present Optics - a system for sending messages between consensus systems without paying header validation costs by creating the illusion of cross-chain communication. Similar to an atomic swap, Optics uses non-global protocol validation to simulate cross-chain communication. Optics can carry arbitrary messages (raw byte vectors), uses a single-producer multi-consumer model, and has protocol overhead sublinear in the number of messages being sent.

Key Points

System sketch:

1. A "home" chain commits messages in a merkle tree
2. A bonded "updater" attests to the commitment
3. The home chain ensures the attestation is accurate, and slashes if not
4. Attested updates are replayed on any number of "replica" chains, after a time delay

As a result, one of the following is always true:

1. All replicas have a valid commitment to messages from the home chain
2. Failure was published before processing, and the updater can be slashed on the home chain

This guarantee, although weaker than header-chain validation, is still likely acceptable for most applications.

Summary

Optics is a new strategy for simulating cross-chain communication without validating headers. The goal is to create a single short piece of state (a 32-byte hash) that can be updated regularly. This hash represents a merkle tree containing a set of cross-chain messages being sent by a single chain (the "home" chain for the Optics system). Contracts on the home chain can submit messages, which are put into a merkle tree (the "message tree"). The message tree's root may be transferred to any number of "replica" chains.

Rather than proving validity of the commitment, we put a delay on message receipt, and ensure that failures are publicly visible. This ensures that participants in the protocol have a chance to react to failures before the failure can harm them. Which is to say, rather than preventing the inclusion of bad messages, Optics guarantees that message recipients are aware of the inclusion, and have a chance to refuse to process them.

To produce this effect, the home chain designates a single "updater." The updater places a bond ensuring her good behavior. She is responsible for producing signed attestations of the new message tree root. The home chain accepts and validates these attestations. It ensures that they extend a previous attestation, and contain a valid new root of the message set. These attestations are then sent to each replica.

The replica accepts an update attestation signed by the updater, and puts it in a pending state. After a timeout, it accepts the update from that attestation and stores a new local root. Because this root contains a commitment of all messages sent by the home chain, these messages can be proven (using the replica's root) and then dispatched to contracts on the replica chain.

The timeout on new updates to the replica serves two purposes:

1. It ensures that any misbehavior by the updater is published in advance of message processing. This guarantees that data necessary for home chain slashing is available for all faults.
2. It gives message recipients a chance to opt-out of message processing for the update. If an incorrect update is published, recipients always have the information necessary to take defensive measures before any messages can be processed.