Application for Filecoin ProPGF Batch 3

drand: improving the gossipsub (libp2p) distribution network and relays services

https://github.com/drand

https://www.drand.love/

Yolan Romailler, drand tech lead, Slack/Emails

All Filecoin SPs are relying on drand randomness in order to perform leader election, the pubsub network is currently the lowest latency distribution method we have for SPs.

Fully Open Source

The current state of the Gossipsub relays and Libp2p network used by most Lotus SPs to consume drand beacons with very low latency is overly centralized and has been a source of concern for community members in the past. The current drand distribution network works as follows: - There are 3 libp2p relays ran by the drand team, one the US, one in Europe and one in Asia. - There are 3 http relays ran by the drand team, one the US, one in Europe and one in Asia. - Cloudflare is running a HTTP relay on their own CDN network, providing drand beacons globally through it. One goal of the drand team is to find new League members, encourage existing ones to run relays and improve the state of the current distribution network, this grant proposal is about doing all of these. Upon request this grant is now only about keeping high SLAs for the gossip relay network.

61000

Indirect

Indirect

Indirect

Timely maintenance of the drand stack allows to ensure smooth operation of the League of Entropy mainnet, as well as timely production and delivery of drand beacons to SPs. By providing all SPs across the world with access to drand randomness, we allow them to run timely Leader Elections for each block which is a crucial component of Filecoin's consensus mechanism. Widening and improving the Libp2p and Gossipsub distribution network allows us to reduce the risk to the network that is caused by its current centralization, thus significantly reducing the risks of a failure of said drand beacon distribution network. This allows for a smooth Filecoin experience for all other Filecoin users, as the Filecoin network can continue running without a hitch. Having high SLAs on the gossipsub relays, and drand nodes is important.

| - | - | - | - | |Liveness of the League of Entropy mainnet on both HTTP and PubSub networks| New grafana dashboard | by relying on new measurements in said new dashboard | 99.99% uptime of both distribution networks | | Timely update of the new software stack|Github releases | By fetching Github releases | 2-3 upgrades|

- Will Scott - Jennifer Wang - Jakub Sztandera - Peter Rabbitson

| Name |Role | Relevant experience| | - | - | - | | Yolan Romailler|Tech Lead & Core Engineer | Yolan has been working as a core engineer on drand since 2022 and prior to that was operating a drand node in the League of Entropy since its inception in 2019.| |Patrick McClurg |Fullstack Engineer | Patrick has been working as a core engineer on drand since 2022 and was the one behind the new asychronous ceremony capabilities which greatly helped reduce the burden of running ceremonies for the League of Entropy, allowing it to grow further. |

A lack of funding for drand maintenance would ultimately cause the League of Entropy to most likely disfunction, preventing it from providing timely verifiable randomness to the Filecoin network. We have not identified any other risks, as the bus factor of the team is high enough to ensure continued maintenance otherwise.

We have removed milestones about: - Create simplified workflows for relays deployment by partners - Improving data collection and alerts related to relays - Diversification of the League of Entropy (new members are important to keep the league healthy, especially whet old members are leaving, we are going to loose 2 partners in an upcoming ceremony, sadly) - Diversification of the partners operating gossip sub relays (currently only 1 team is running them, us)