The Plumo Ceremony
A multi-party computation for Plumo, the Celo ultralight client protocol
“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.”
— Emily Dickinson
We are excited to kickoff the trusted setup for Plumo with a multi-party computation ceremony — together with the Celo community and friends. You can find the form to sign up here for the initial phase.
What is Plumo?
Plumo is a zero-knowledge SNARK based syncing protocol that takes the “lightest sync” mode to the next level. By reducing the time and data needed to sync the blockchain by multiple orders of magnitude, Plumo enables even the most resource constrained mobile devices to transact trustlessly on the Celo network.
The SNARK at the heart of Plumo enables light clients to sync with the Celo network via ultra-light sync mode. A single SNARK generated by the Plumo protocol can verify over 100 epoch headers instantaneously, allowing light clients to verify this in a quick, light, and trustless way. This results in sync speeds that are orders of magnitude faster, with improvements in the amount of data you need to sync with the Celo network by a factor of around 1,000,000 relative to other networks.
Plumo is one of the largest SNARKs to be deployed. Internally, it proves the correctness of the evolution of Celo epochs, just as a light client would have seen. This means that essentially it proves the light client protocol. It does this through verifying over 100 BLS signatures that use a combination of a Bowe-Hopwood variant of a Pedersen hash and Blake2s for its hash to curve, and performs the consistency checks of validator elections, asserting that ⅔ of the validator set agreed on the next set. Plumo uses the two-chain of BLS12–377 and BW6 to create BW6 proofs that ultra-light clients verify. This allows them to verify a large number of epochs by verifying a single SNARK proof.
The SNARK requires one final step before it can go live on mainnet — the Plumo MPC Ceremony, which requires the help of Celo friends and community.
What is the Plumo Ceremony?
A Multi-Party-Computation (MPC) is a cryptographic mechanism for different parties to jointly perform a computation. SNARK circuits require a “trusted setup” where parties work together to generate shared parameters that can be used to prove and verify SNARKs. If one person ran this setup, then they could potentially prove incorrect things by exploiting a backdoor in the circuit. However, with an MPC, this setup process is split amongst tens or hundreds of contributors, and if even one of the participants is honest (keeps their inputs private), then the system will be secure.
In the case of the Plumo Ceremony, this collective computation will be a series of joint actions done by a group of participants from within the Celo community and beyond. They will be working to perform an MPC that secures the SNARK proving the Plumo ultralight client protocol.
The ceremony will consist of rounds of about 6–10 participants each running the Plumo setup software for a certain period of time. Each round will last approximately 36 hours. While much of the activity is passive and involves simply running the computation on a desktop machine, for the Ceremony participants should feel confident with running commands in the terminal and destroying USB keys. This will allow participants to feel comfortable with the commitment so that the Ceremony can run smoothly.
The SNARK being secured by the Plumo Ceremony is one of the most complex yet powerful SNARKs to ever be secured, and the outcome can be used not only by cLabs & the Plumo construction, but also by any project that uses the BW6 curve with the Groth16 proving system or any other based on polynomial commitments. By participating in this Ceremony, participants can be part of something that is a public good, and will hopefully be used to power many more systems to come.
How do I get involved?
If you are interested to know more about Plumo and participate in Phase 1 of the Ceremony, please fill out the form here.
You can also join the Celo Discord if you want to ask questions or discuss more in the #plumo channel.
Read and watch here for more resources on Plumo:
- Whitepaper
- Celo Tech Talk on Plumo with Michael Straka
- cLabs Tech Sync letter
- zkSummit 2020 talk on Plumo with Kobi Gurkan
*Please read the Terms & Conditions of the Plumo Ceremony here.
