Rsmt6

[ristik]

• new data structure (rsmt6a)
• formal treatment, security proof
• no history, no previous attempts documented
• sharding
• proof recursion for maxis

[gemini-code-assist]

Code Review

This pull request updates the abstract in the README.md to provide a more comprehensive overview of the Unicity protocol, introducing concepts like append-only consistency, the RSMT consistency proof, and recursive STARK aggregation. Additionally, it updates the bibliography file with formal arXiv preprint citations. The review feedback points out a minor grammatical issue in the newly added abstract text, suggesting the addition of the indefinite article "an" before "Algebraic Intermediate Representation (AIR) circuit" for correct phrasing.

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[gemini-code-assist]

The phrase implemented as Algebraic Intermediate Representation (AIR) circuit is missing the indefinite article an before Algebraic. Since circuit is a singular countable noun, it should be preceded by an.

Suggested change

Unicity is a novel blockchain protocol with the ambitious goal of enabling peer-to-peer token transactions to occur off-chain, without shared ordering and execution overhead. This premise requires supporting infrastructure to guarantee that there are no parallel states of assets, or more specifically, that there is no double-spending; a property we term the *unicity*. It turns out that the lack of globally shared state and ordering reduces the blockchain overhead considerably. In designing this infrastructure, no compromises were made regarding its trust assumptions. This paper details the design of the Aggregation Layer, the component responsible for producing Proofs of Inclusion and Non-inclusion to the users. We analyze its design for efficiency and evaluate the robustness of its trust and security model, and design optimal data structures and algorithms for this setup. We then identify the critical property that the Consensus Layer must verify on each round---*append-only consistency*, combining prior-state preservation with coherent placement of insertions---give it a formal definition, and prove that the RSMT consistency proof enforces it over the entire certified history, assuming only collision resistance of the hash function. The structural core of this statement is implemented as Algebraic Intermediate Representation (AIR) circuit on top of the Plonky3 STARK toolkit. The implementation sustains a proving throughput in excess of 10 000 insertions per second on a single consumer-class CPU, with a succinct proof and tens of milliseconds verification time, and no trusted setup. Finally, we describe how the per-round proofs of all shards, together with the Consensus Layer's state transitions, are folded into a single recursively aggregated STARK: a fixed-size certificate of the correctness of the system's entire operating history, verifiable against the genesis configuration alone, without trusting the validator set.

Unicity is a novel blockchain protocol with the ambitious goal of enabling peer-to-peer token transactions to occur off-chain, without shared ordering and execution overhead. This premise requires supporting infrastructure to guarantee that there are no parallel states of assets, or more specifically, that there is no double-spending; a property we term the *unicity*. It turns out that the lack of globally shared state and ordering reduces the blockchain overhead considerably. In designing this infrastructure, no compromises were made regarding its trust assumptions. This paper details the design of the Aggregation Layer, the component responsible for producing Proofs of Inclusion and Non-inclusion to the users. We analyze its design for efficiency and evaluate the robustness of its trust and security model, and design optimal data structures and algorithms for this setup. We then identify the critical property that the Consensus Layer must verify on each round---*append-only consistency*, combining prior-state preservation with coherent placement of insertions---give it a formal definition, and prove that the RSMT consistency proof enforces it over the entire certified history, assuming only collision resistance of the hash function. The structural core of this statement is implemented as an Algebraic Intermediate Representation (AIR) circuit on top of the Plonky3 STARK toolkit. The implementation sustains a proving throughput in excess of 10 000 insertions per second on a single consumer-class CPU, with a succinct proof and tens of milliseconds verification time, and no trusted setup. Finally, we describe how the per-round proofs of all shards, together with the Consensus Layer's state transitions, are folded into a single recursively aggregated STARK: a fixed-size certificate of the correctness of the system's entire operating history, verifiable against the genesis configuration alone, without trusting the validator set.