Sky Protocol: Data Availability for Cardano Layer 2 Solutions

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

François-René Rideau

[GENERAL] Are you delivering this project as an individual or as an entity (whether formally incorporated or not)

Entity (Incorporated)

[GENERAL] Co-proposers and additional applicants

Mutual Knowledge Systems, Inc. https://mukn.com/

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

4

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language

No

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem (200-character limit including spaces)

The Sky Protocol Network makes Data Available to Side-Chain participants. Its committee members sign messages in a format designed to be easy for Plutus contracts to validate and use.

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

No

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.”

No dependencies.

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

Yes

[GENERAL] Please provide here more information on the open source status of your project outputs

Project will use Apache License v2.0.

[METADATA] SDG rating

By reducing the cost of validating decentralized applications (DApps) compared to today's Layer 1 DApps or to centralized systems, we will contribute both to the UN Sustainable Development Goals with respect to Energy Usage, reduction of Climate Harm, Sustainable economic activity, etc.

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution

There is no good Data Availability Solution today for Side-Chains on Cardano:

• Applications can publish their data on-chain, but this is slow and expensive.
• Individual Applications can each roll their own Data Availability solution, but this requires more work, and in the end, the solution is only protected by as much capital as each individual application.
• Applications can try to use Celestia or EigenLayer or another Data Availability Solution that wasn't designed to work with Cardano, but it will require a lot of effort, and you have to trust these networks.

Sky Protocol will build a Data Availability Solution tailored to the needs to Cardano:

• We will publish data in a way that makes it easy for Plutus contracts to validate the data and to use it as part of Layer 1 contracts.
• Our network will be rooted in Cardano with its own Cardano-based token, which will require fewer trust assumptions than using other networks.
• Our network will allow many Cardano-based DApps to share the same Data Availability network and pool the costs of both software development and immobilized capital for validation of this network, as compared to each app building its own network.
• Our network will eventually sport additional censorship-resistant features: for instance, time-locked blinding of data so that committee members cannot selectively censor data.
• Our network will also eventually use RAID5-style coding of data so that committee members only each see a fraction of the data, and the whole data can be recovered with a 2/3 honest fraction of the committee members.
• Finally, our network will support DApp validation in both "optimistic" style through interactive games, and "pessimistic" style through zero-knowledge proofs.

Our approach will allow DApp developers to write either high-speed, low-latency DApps, or highly censorship-resistance, low-latency DApps, either way with high throughput and low-costs, all of it rooted on the Cardano blockchain.

To demonstrate our impact, we will show how such DApps can be easily made on Cardano using our infrastructure—thereby multiplying the utility of the Cardano network.

[IMPACT] Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community

Our project will lower the cost of launching DApps on Cardano, both in development time and in capital to immobilize for continuous DApp validation.

[CAPABILITY & FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

In the past, our team has worked with IOHK to successfully port our Glow language to an early version of Plutus.

We have also developed the AVOUM concept for Account-style DApps on top of UTXO blockchains.

We previously were Catalyst grant recipients for work on Formal Verification for Glow and for a study of AVOUM on Cardano.

We have given talks at Cardano Conferences.

We also have worked with other blockchains and blockchain projects (Ethereum, Harmony One, Nervos, Laconic).

[PROJECT MILESTONES] What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

Milestone 1: Study for Data Availability with Validation on Cardano

The first milestone will include a feasibility study for how we will interface our Data Availability Network with Cardano.

The outline of a Plutus contract will be developed, but it may not be fully working or debugged.

More important will be to identify any blocker issue (if any, hopefully none) that may exist in implementing our Data Availability solution, and give immediate feedback to the Plutus team if such blocker is found. Even without any blocker found, we will identify the means to achieve our goal, and especially identify pitfalls and false routes that we have to avoid in achieving it.

Milestone 2: Cardano Contract that interacts with a Centralized Data Availability Operator

The second milestone will be a simple Cardano Contract that depends on specific data having been published on a centralized Data Availability service.

For instance, we will write a contract that pays a certain amount if a preimage to an agreed-upon hash was published on the Data Availability service.

This milestone will thus demonstrate how a simple Cardano DApp can make use of a Data Availability service.

Milestone 3: Cardano Contract that interacts with a Decentralized Data Availability Committee

The third milestone will be a simple Cardano Contract that depends on specific data having been published on a decentralized Data Availability service.

We will modify the DApp above to work with a decentralized service.

The DApp will be largely unmodified, but the data availability validation library it uses will be more sophisticated.

Milestone 4: End-to-End Test of a Cardano Contract using the Data Availability Network

We will demonstrate a test application running against a test data availability network, all of it on Cardano.

n/a

Final Milestone (5): Project Close-out Report and Video

[RESOURCES] Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

• François-René Rideau https://linkedin.com/in/fahree Software Architect & Lead Developer
• Gauthier Lamothe https://linkedin.com/in/gauthier-lamothe/ Chief Marketing Officer
• Alexander Smart https://linkedin.com/in/alexandersmart/ Chief Executive Officer

[BUDGET & COSTS] Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources

• 1 lead dev / project manager : 28 kUSD
• 1 senior dev : 28 kUSD
• 1 junior dev : 20 kUSD
• Project-related fees : 14 kUSD
• Operating fees : 10 kUSD

[VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

Thanks to the Sky Protocol, the Cardano Ecosystem will become usable for faster, more scalable, more private, and/or more censorship-resistant DApps running on as many side-chains, yet protected by a shared Data Availability Network.