The Nume protocol is a new type of rollup deployed on Ethereum that provides trustless instant settlements without the computational overhead of zero-knowledge proofs. Where existing rollups navigate a tradeoff between cost and settlement finality times (i.e. Optimistic Rollups vs Zero Knowledge Rollups), we mitigate the tradeoff by utilizing hardware enclaves and decentralized governance. For an overview, please refer to this post.
We previously discussed Nume’s Security Model and in this post, we will discuss the Nume Protocol’s data availability (DA) model.
Guaranteeing data availability on IPFS
Nume stores transaction data corresponding to each settlement in IPFS. Each run of the hardware enclave (which executes the offchain rollup algorithm to compute the new state) starts by the enclave first downloading the transaction data from a provided IPFS CID. The content is downloaded from IPFS over https and the enclave performs a TLS handshake to verify the integrity of this data. This downloaded content becomes the basis for the state transitions in this settlement, and the CID is a part of the final commitment to the new state generated by the enclave.
Once the execution of the state update algorithm inside the enclave is completed, we submit the new generated commitment to the contract, hence making the CID location for the transactions processed public on the blockchain. This design guarantees that the transaction data behind a settlement is made publicly available. We use Pinata to pin these transaction documents on IPFS for atleast a month so that interested users have ample time to download them.
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