Referendum 1667: Merkle Mountain Belt

Governance
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MMB paper is out

Hey Polkadot community!

I’m posting this on behalf of the team that proposed MMB in Ref. 1667. We will use this medium to keep the community informed of the advances of the proposal.

Quick reminder: The Merkle Mountain Belt (MMB) is a novel data structure that improves upon the Merkle Mountain Range (MMR), which is currently used within BEEFY to build a commitment to all finalized blocks and messages. A switch from MMR to MMB in BEEFY will reduce the average costs of proving that anything happened in Polkadot. In particular, it will reduce the gas costs for users of a Polkadot-to-Ethereum bridge.

First big announcement: The MMB paper is out!

We invite researchers and devs alike to check it out, share it, and give us feedback. In it we describe in depth how MMB works and how it will reduce fee costs in Polkadot’s cross-chain bridges. We also describe many other possible use cases for MMB. In fact, we argue that MMB deservers a place in the toolset of any blockchain protocol designer, next to (or instead of) MMR.

We will post further news on MMB here very soon. Stay tuned!

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Hey guys! This is Chen-Da, Professor at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in cryptography, distributed systems and blockchains. Being myself a prior researcher at W3F, I was kindly asked by the authors to have a look at the paper.

I am happy to see the MMB paper is finally out! I enjoyed reading the paper and liked the comparison to MMR structures in terms of efficiency. The analysis of the security properties is also interesting, as well as the summary including some of the possible applications.

Looking forward to see more news about this project!

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