Sky Protocol - Implement a minimal decentralized network

[Proposal setup] Proposal title

Please provide your proposal title

Sky Protocol - Implement a minimal decentralized network

[Proposal Summary] Budget Information

Enter the amount of funding you are requesting in ADA

100000

[Proposal Summary] Time

Please specify how many months you expect your project to last

6

[Proposal Summary] Translation Information

Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated

No

Original Language

en

[Proposal Summary] Problem Statement

What is the problem you want to solve?

The data availability network we have built is not yet decentralized. It needs to become secure through decentralization.

[Proposal Summary] Supporting Documentation

Supporting links

• https://github.com/SkyProtocol-org/skyprotocol
,
• https://skyprotocol.org/token
,
• https://skyprotocol.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/technical-wp.pd

[Proposal Summary] Project Dependencies

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

No

Describe any dependencies or write 'No dependencies'

No dependencies

[Proposal Summary] Project Open Source

Will your project's outputs be fully open source?

Yes

License and Additional Information

Apache Licence V 2.0

[Theme Selection] Theme

Please choose the most relevant theme and tag related to the outcomes of your proposal

Infrastructure

[Campaign Category] Category Questions

Mention your open source license and describe your open source license rationale.

Apache V2.0

We believe it's a moral imperative an a technical standard to publish a code that every builder can understand in-depth.

Thus, all of our code is public, on our github, and explainable.

How do you make sure your source code is accessible to the public from project start, and people are informed?

Our public Github, our discord where development talks happen in public, and our regular updates have been a practice for Sky Protocol, since day 1.

We intend to keep doing that so that everyone can comment, criticize healthily, and stay informed.

How will you provide high quality documentation?

Videos, live tests that are recorded, readme files, and neatly commented code.

To have more insights about that, take a look at our monthly code demos on Sky Protocol's Youtube channel, or at our commented code with readme files on Github.

[Your Project and Solution] Solution

Please describe your proposed solution and how it addresses the problem

Thanks to Catalyst Fund 12, we have a smart contract for Cardano and some minimal (centralized) off-chain infrastructure to test it. For Catalyst Fund 14, we will implement the basis for network decentralization for the DA infrastructure: a Gossip protocol that can automatically scale with our users. Depending on the findings of our initial study, the Gossip protocol will either be a variant of Cardano’s gossip protocol extended to scale libp2p (e.g. with per-topic copies of the gossip network), or a variant of libp2p possibly extended to be more like Cardano, or yet another protocol to be determined. Whichever protocol we pick, we will interface it with SkyDA’s server so our nodes can talk to each other in a secure scalable way.

[Your Project and Solution] Impact

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

Our SkyDA project lowers costs of launching scalable DApps on Cardano, both in development time and in capital to immobilize for continuous DApp validation. This Gossip protocol will pave the way for massive decentralization of Data Availability on Cardano, and thus for Cardano being able to “eat the world” and turn all data into blockchain data (GB/s, TB/s)—when today Cardano is limited to 4kB/s for the whole world.

[Your Project and Solution] Capabilities & 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?

We have completed all of our milestones, for our Catalyst Fund 12 project, which was the beginning of our work on building the data availability network on Cardano.

We have also developed traction among the Cardano community, and we continue to do so.

Relevant community growth metrics include :

• More than 2,800 followers on X

• More than 600 members on our Discord server

• Sky Protocol's admittance at the CV labs' accelerator in Switzerland

We also recently published a technical demo of our tesnet, showing that all the tech we promised is accessible and usable.

[Milestones] Project Milestones

Milestone Title

Study of Scalable Decentralized Gossip

Milestone Outputs

The first milestone is to study what is the existing offering in terms of Gossip protocols that could be added to SkyDA: if possible written in Haskell and readily usable by our Cardano-flavored code base, but more importantly, able to scale to a very large number of nodes each interested in a small subset of “topics”.

Acceptance Criteria

The extensive study covers the current solutions and what tech we can replicate and what's missing according to our original whitepaper and development plans for Sky Protocol.

The study allows us to list functions that we'll implement and those that we'll create directly.

Evidence of Completion

A specific commit of our GitHub repository that contains a document being the report from our study. The report will recommend a design, explain our design choices, and a minimal API for the Gossip protocol.

Delivery Month

1

Cost

20000

Progress

10 %

Milestone Title

Initial Experimental Implementation of the Gossip protocol

Milestone Outputs

This milestone will demonstrate an experimental implementation of the Gossip protocol. It needs not be completely fleshed out or have all the features we need, but it will demonstrate two essential features that we seek, (a) the ability to scale to a large number of machines each handling only a small subset of the topics, and (b) the ability to integrate into the rest of our Cardano-friendly SkyDA code base.

Acceptance Criteria

A tester can replicate the implementation proceure of our Gossip algorithm while implementing Sky Protocol and following our documentation.

The test can work on different types of networks on Cardano.

Evidence of Completion

A specific commit of our GitHub repository that contains the code as well as a test script so that anyone can reproduce a test deployment of this experimental gossip protocol. No feature is required beside basic operation and integration with our code base; the integration can be minimal and fail to implement any SkyDA feature beside a demo.

Delivery Month

2

Cost

30000

Progress

30 %

Milestone Title

Milestone 3 - Implementation of the Gossip Protocol

Milestone Outputs

For this milestone, we will implement a minimal yet complete enough variant of the gossip protocol as specified in the report from Milestone 1. Integration with the rest of SkyDA will remain minimal, with no actual SkyDA feature implemented with it.

Acceptance Criteria

The gossip protocol's minimal functionalities are present in the code base and importable by an external developer trying to access them.

The test deployment is successful on a partner's network or chain.

Evidence of Completion

A specific commit of our GitHub repository that contains the code as well as a test script so that anyone can reproduce a test deployment of this minimal yet complete gossip protocol. No integration with SkyDA yet besides test use of the gossip.

Delivery Month

3

Cost

25000

Progress

60 %

Milestone Title

Gossip with Sky DA Integration

Milestone Outputs

For this Milestone, we will integrate our Gossip protocol with our SkyDA data availability servers, in a way sufficient to publish and retrieve data to and from arbitrary other nodes of the network data.

Acceptance Criteria

Data retrieval is made possible on our Data Availability Layer's testnet.

The gossip protocol can also be use to publish data (those two conditions are intermingled, obviously, but these are two separate operations)

Evidence of Completion

A specific commit of our GitHub repository that contains the code as well as a test script so that anyone can reproduce a test deployment of our gossip protocol and its use to publish and retrieve DA data. No other feature is required and in particular, no consensus is required.

Delivery Month

5

Cost

20000

Progress

90 %

Milestone Title

Close-out report & Wrap-up video

Milestone Outputs

This Milestone culminates in a demonstration of a Proof-of-Authority Data Availability Network with Data published and read on different nodes.

For this Catalyst Grant we will not be dealing with payment and scalability functionalities.

Acceptance Criteria

The video and the report recap all the technological decisions that have been made and highlight where to find each detailed piece of documentation in order to implement Sky Protocol and use its gossip algorithm to publish and retrieve data.

Evidence of Completion

A Project Close-out Report and Video with demonstration.

The video is between 10 and 15 minutes and reviews all the functionalities that we have developed.

Delivery Month

6

Cost

5000

Progress

100 %

[Final Pitch] Budget & Costs

Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources

• Lead developer / CTO - 8K ADA per month for 5 months (last milestone doesn't involve him much) - 40K ADA total
• Developers - 6K ADA each for 5 months - 60K ADA total

Operating expenses and other staff members (COO, CFO, lawyer, CM) are already covered by our company.

[Final Pitch] Value for Money

How does the cost of the project represent value for the Cardano ecosystem?

Sky protocol has the potential to allow Cardano to compete with Web2 payment solutions and servers: gaining a million times more transactions per second would draw more builders whose progress is hindered by Cardano's current bandwidth.

[Required Acknowledgements] Consent & Confirmation

Terms and Conditions:

Yes