Oneiron: Cardano Sidechain SDK

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

A JVM-based Cardano Sidechain SDK will close this gap and open Cardano ecosystem to millions of enterprise software developers. Thousands public and private Cardano sidechains will be created.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

Experience leading teams, building software with a spectrum of technologies: imperative and functional languages (mostly, JVM-based), web stacks, Kubernetes. Plutus Pioneer (3rd cohort).

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Vision

We’re building Oneiron SDK — an open-source JVM-based Cardano Sidechain SDK. Our goal is to enable developers already familiar with enterprise/web technologies to create Cardano sidechains and applications quickly and easily.

“Oneiron” (Ancient Greek) — “Dream”. Our dream is to bring millions of developers to Cardano.

With Oneiron SDK, anyone will be able to create a sidechain node with a simple CLI command, without writing a line of code. Oneiron-built node will be able to join an existing sidechain (built with Oneiron SDK) or to create an entirely new Cardano sidechain.

We’re also aiming to create Oneiron Network — a Cardano sidechain built with our SDK, enabling developers to start building apps immediately (without necessarily running their own nodes), with a variety of programming languages.

The language runtime choice is designed to primarily target the massive enterprise/web developer audience.

The Oneiron smart-contract runtime will be JVM-based, so it will support languages like Java, Kotlin, Scala, Clojure, etc., as well as JavaScript, Python, Ruby. We also aim to include support for Wasm and PlutusCore in the future.

Oneiron Network will use the Cardano eUTXO accounting model and Ouroboros consensus protocol.

In the future, we also aim to include support for IBC protocol to enable interoperability with Cosmos Hub and blockchains in the Cosmos ecosystem.

Current Scope

The scope of this particular proposal is to build the the first approximation of our sidechain SDK, capable of creating single node Cardano sidechains. Users will still be able to:

• easily install the SDK,
• create their own (single-node, but still real) Cardano sidechain, capable of running smart-contracts on a JVM-based language runtime,
• begin development and run their apps on the sidechain.

Creating and/or joining multi-node sidechains (and therefore, implementation of the Ouroboros consensus protocol) will be a subject of a future proposal.

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

Alignment with strategic goals for Fund9

Prepare a group of people willing and able to make contributions to the ecosystem.

• Oneiron opens up the Cardano ecosystem to hordes of enterprise/web developers.

Turn Cardano into an open source project.

• Oneiron is open source from the beginning.

Accelerate the growth and evolution of developer & app ecosystem.

• Easy creation of Cardano sidechains with the Oneiron SDK and the JVM-based language runtime will bridge the skill gap for existing enterprise/web developers.

Key Metrics

Oneiron Cardano Sidechain SDK, when funded and built, will positively affect the Challenge metrics:

On-chain activity growth due to new cross-chain implementations

• Potentially thousands of sidechains created with the SDK, inevitably leading to activity growth.

Number of proposals including participants from other blockchain communities

• Closing technology gap will bring developers unfamiliar with Plutus and Haskell.

Number of technical implementations connecting Cardano to other blockchains

• Building cross-chain bridges will be far easier with the sidechain SDK.

Ideas from other chains implemented by Catalyst

• Oneiron SDK borrows an idea from Cosmos: the Cosmos SDK 😉

Projects and dApps from other chains implemented on Cardano

• Easier application development will help increase this number.

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

Implementing connectivity with Cardano blockchain using research papers as blueprint (vs a working prototype or a documented API) is currently the biggest challenge. Mitigation:

• The papers in question are peer reviewed and published works, which gives us a good level of confidence in the theory.
• We are, luckily, not the first: there’s Milkomeda, Mamba and other sidechains to learn from.
• Addressing this issue is the highest priority item on our backlog, so we will make sure to solve this before anything else.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

M0 (2-4 weeks): Ingest the available Cardano research papers on sidechains. Make notes in the form of wiki / design docs. The desired outcome of this milestone is a backlog of implementable development tasks on GitHub.

M1 (4-8 weeks): A minimal sidechain connected to Cardano testnet being able to transfer test ADA from the Cardano testnet into the sidechain and back.

M2 (2-4 weeks): First shot at the smart-contract runtime for a JVM-based language.

M3 (2-4 weeks): Smart-contract runtime interface is defined for JavaScript.

M4 (2-4 weeks): The SDK is installable using Homebrew (brew install) on macOS. Support for other package managers are in the backlog.

M5 (2-4 weeks): Documentation is available on the docs website and linked from the project GitHub repo.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

The above milestone plan will take ~4-7 months of the founding engineer working ~8h per week on this project. For contingency, let’s round it up to 8 months (or 32 weeks).

With the hourly rate of $256, the project total cost is $256/h × 8h/w × 32w = $65,536.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

Ivan Mikushin is a Staff Engineer at VMware and has 20+ years of software engineering experience: leading teams and building software with a spectrum of technologies: imperative and functional languages (mostly, JVM-based), web stacks, Kubernetes. Plutus Pioneer (3rd cohort).

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/imikushin

Twitter: @imikushin

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

Absolutely! We will need to build a few key components, like:

• Multi-node sidechains built with the Oneiron SDK (implementation of the Ouroboros consensus protocol),
• Wasm scripts in sidechains built with the Oneiron SDK,
• PlutusCore scripts in sidechains built with the Oneiron SDK,
• Support IBC protocol to enable interoperability with Cosmos Hub and blockchains in the Cosmos ecosystem.

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

We will estimate all deliverable feature development work in “points” and measure development velocity in number of points in delivered features every 2 weeks (we will produce a release every 2 weeks).

We will also measure unit-test coverage of the codebase (keep it high) and build time (keep it low).

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

The project (within the scope of this proposal) is successful if:

• An enterprise or web application developer can install the Oneiron SDK and create a single-node Cardano sidechain in 15 minutes by following instructions in the project README on GitHub.
• Some amount of ADA can be transferred from the main Cardano blockchain into the sidechain and back.
• A smart-contract written in JavaScript can be deployed and verified to work on the sidechain.

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

An entirely new project. The idea shaped up the last week of June 2022.