MobileCoin Foundation Roadmap Update — Quarter 1, 2021
The MobileCoin Foundation has been hard at work developing a product roadmap. Today we are ready to share our roadmap for Q1. Stay tuned for more product roadmaps to be updated quarterly.
Foundation Watcher Node
Our Foundation Watcher Node allows people who are not running SGX in consensus to verify the integrity of the network. SGX produces signatures that validate Intel’s verification of an enclave, ensuring the enclave can be trusted and that its software is up-to-date. Each node has a private key inside the enclave and signs every block before appending it to the ledger. The watcher syncs the block signatures and attestation evidence to provide an audit of the enclaves participating in consensus for each block.
MobileCoin Fog
MobileCoin Fog is a suite of oblivious microservices that enable MobileCoin payments on mobile devices: Picture essentially a cloud through which you’re unable to see. MobileCoin Fog is now open source. More information is available here: mobilecoinfoundation/fog.
Monitoring Improvements
Monitoring a decentralized network can be challenging. Each node operates independently; visibility into activities or health as a service is not necessary. The MobileCoin Foundation encourages node operators to collaborate on sharing information, logging issues, and alerting one another. For Q1 and beyond, node operators will be investing in improving overall monitoring of the individual nodes, as well as overall network health.
Quorum Set Intersection
Quorum Set Intersection is a property of the MobileCoin network consensus layer. When the trust graph has sufficient edges between participants, then every node participating in consensus plays a part in validating transactions. If quorum intersection is lost, then it is possible for the network to fork, resulting in two ledgers. Monitoring quorum set intersection helps prevent the occurence of forks. Some tools exist for monitoring other Byzantine Fault Agreement Consensus networks, such as stellarbeat.io. MobileCoin is working on similar tooling.
We would like to give a huge thank you to Sara Drakely Hall, Konstantin Richter, and Michael Rodriguez for spearheading and implementing these initiatives. If you would like to participate in our code improvement process, please visit us on Github for more information.
Our Q2 Roadmap will be available in early April.
