Drand Timelock Decryption Using Cartesi Coprocessor

Proposed RFPs
1

RFP Title:

Drand Timelock Decryption Using Cartesi Coprocessor

Wave 2 Intent:

Intent 1: Maximize modular integrations

Overview:

Timelock encryption is a cryptographic scheme that enables data to be decrypted only after a specific amount of time has passed. One such use case has been seen in Shielded Snapshot votes for example.

The drand network provides a decentralized and verifiable source of randomness, making it a natural fit for timelock encryption use cases. This explains the drand timelock encryption approach further: Understanding Timelock Encryption with drand: Secure Future Decryption and tools/libraries like GitHub - drand/tlock: Timelock Encryption made practical. The Go `tlock` library and the `tle` cmd line tool home to encrypt towards the future.

This Request for Proposal (RFP) focuses on leveraging the computational capabilities of Cartesi’s coprocessor to perform secure and verifiable drand-based timelock decryption.

Current implementations often lack flexibility or scalability due to the computational limitations of traditional on-chain processing. By integrating Cartesi’s off-chain computation, this project aims to make timelock decryption on Ethereum more efficient, accessible, and scalable.

Use cases include, but are not limited to:

  • Time-released access to sensitive information.
  • Delayed smart contract execution with verifiable decryption.
  • Trustless and decentralized delayed data access in applications like auctions or lotteries.

Solution:

The desired solution involves implementing drand timelock decryption using Cartesi’s coprocessor. The expected approach includes:

  1. Drand Integration: Adapt a lightweight library for Cartesi that integrates with the drand network and processes randomness beacons for decryption tasks.
  2. Timelock Decryption Logic: Design and deploy the drand timelock decryption mechanism to be usable by other Ethereum smart contracts, where the heavy computation is offloaded to Cartesi’s coprocessor.
  3. Optimized Gas Costs: Minimize gas costs by performing computationally expensive operations off-chain while keeping interactions with Ethereum efficient and secure.
  4. Tooling and Documentation: Provide comprehensive documentation, test cases, and development tools to support adoption by other developers in the ecosystem.
  5. Mainnet deployment: The solution must be deployed and usable by Ethereum L1 smart contracts and use the Cartesi Coprocessor.

Team Qualifications:

The ideal team should possess the following skills and expertise:

  • Proficiency in cryptographic protocols, particularly timelock encryption and drand randomness integration.
  • Experience developing and optimizing solutions for the Cartesi platform.
  • Mid-level knowledge of Ethereum smart contracts
  • Strong software engineering skills with experience in Golang and Solidity
  • Excellent documentation practices to support reproducibility and scalability.

Watch more about the Cartesi Coprocessor here.

2 Likes
2

Can you expand a bit on the demand you see for this feature? I think an important part of evaluating RFPs is not just assessing whether the proposal is technically sound or useful in general terms, but also considering whether it’s the right time for it. Is this addressing an immediate need within the ecosystem, or are we aiming to anticipate a future demand?

I’m sharing this same feedback on other proposals as well, as I think these questions are key to making well-informed decisions. Thanks for your input!

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3

I think admittedly this is a ‘make it possible so people can imagine and try to build things on it’ – there is a market addressed by for example Shutter Network and this is something more specific that would be somewhat intensive in ZK to compute. It’d be parked in low priority but also a nice ability for smart contracts to use. May be suddenly very important.

MEV and App Specific Sequencing is still big topics and timelock encryption can be a way to democratise or prevent censorship of certain kinds of transactions.