Implementation has been progressing pretty well recently and important work items have been completed, including the following:
Open issues with Xnet message routing of signing requests
Xnet re-sharing of threshold ECDSA keys is now covered with end-to-end tests (this is a huge achievement of the engineering team)
Key deletion (needed during the initial testing phase to gain some operational experience with the feature on IC mainnet)
All required NNS proposals
System tests
Considering the current state of the implementation, we can expect a first deployment on IC mainnet with a test key by end of the month or in early July. We plan to perform internal testing of the API to test its stability and performance characteristics and, once we have sufficient assurance of this, we open it up for public consumption. We already have a subnet on IC mainnet reserved for this purpose.
We are nearing completion of the feature for a Beta launch. I would assess that we are currently around 90% - 95% complete for the Chromium / Beta launch.
The plan for the release of the Bitcoin integration feature incl. t-ECDSA is as follows:
Chromium (Beta) release in some weeks, target is late June: functionally complete implementation
API for Bitcoin testnet Integration available on IC mainnet for public consumption
Threshold ECDSA deployment with a test key that will be deleted after a Beta phase available on IC mainnet for public consumption
Documentation, videos, and a sample project on how to use the feature
GA (general availability) release targeted at ~1-2+ months after Chromium: production-ready implementation
API for Bitcoin mainnet Integration available on IC mainnet for public consumption
Threshold ECDSA deployment with the production key that will be hosted on two large subnets on IC mainnet for public consumption
ckBTC canister
The Chromium (Beta) release will allow the community to build canisters based on the Bitcoin and threshold ECDSA APIs, i.e., create fully-functional integrations with Bitcoin. The GA release provides fixes towards production readiness, e.g., in the areas of performance, and enables Bitcoin mainnet and the final production threshold ECDSA key.
There are some items still to be implemented for the Chromium / Beta release for t-ECDSA, but some of those are too technical to be self explaining without the full context and are not given here. We estimate those to be doable in the coming few weeks. Examples include:
Performance & latency benchmarks on realistically-sized subnet
Turn feature on by default in the SDK
Supporting key id (only 1 for now in consensus)
Addressing some security findings from the external code review
Signed initial dealings (from xnet resharing)
ic-admin commands for re-sharing to be defined based on tests
Writing a documentation Web page
Recording tutorial videos
For the GA release, the following items are currently on the table:
Indeed, the ckBTC canister is just not ready for Beta.
The actual ckBTC canister work still needs to start, the involved teams are busy with the other features currently. One engineer and one researcher are, however, currently working on a library that the ckBTC canister will use to very reliably implement the UTXO and Bitcoin transaction handling, which will be one key part of the canister.
Also, thereās a dependency on the ledger / token standard that is currently being discussed: The ckBTC canister needs to already implement this standard that is not there yet.
I know you know but sometimes reading it from someone else helps: It is urgent not to rush. The impact of being ālateā will be ln(1) compared to a faulty implementationā¦
The implementation of the feature for the Beta / Chromium release scope is nearing completion. Next to wrapping up the feature implementation, we still need to work on example code that shows how to use the feature as well as documentation. Launching the feature with a test key within 1-2 weeks can be very realistic.
The feature is code complete now and we are finishing up the documentation and still need to perform some stress testing in order to make sure everything works as intended when being run on IC Mainnet as well as some benchmarking on Mainnet to get an understanding of the performance of the feature on a 13-node subnet on Mainnet.
We are very close to making the feature available for the general public with a threshold ECDSA test key to be used only for testing purposes.
The threshold ECDSA Beta release, being a key part of the Bitcoin Testnet release, has been officially announced!
You can now use threshold ECDSA on the IC with a test key. Please note that the test key may be deleted at some point, so it is not advisable to store any value with this key. The test key of the current deployment is intended solely for development and testing purposes, e.g., to hold bitcoin on Bitcoin Testnet.
Documentation:
Sample dApp:
The team is now working mainly on further performance improvements and another security review as there have been quite some changes since the first one.
Nice list, thanks for sharing! Shows thereās huge potential of this feature and a huge amount of work if we want to unleash all of that.
Update
Thereās a couple of things that need to be done now to be ready for a mainnet release. The below ones are the main open areas where we will spend most of the engineering time. We can expect 2-3 months until we can release, but this is a rough indication, please do not use this as a firm release date.
Assurance
One of the big items here is to increase our assurance of correctness of the implementation. We have already done one external round of code reviews with a world-leading code audit company. We are planning to do another round when the changes that we still want to implement are complete. This will be again with a top-notch external review firm. Review reports will most likely be published. And of course we will be doing lots of testing on our own. For a feature like threshold ECDSA, which will protect large amounts of value, such efforts for quality assurance are crucial to ensure that the chance of security issues and thus the risk of value being lost is reduced to an acceptably tiny value.
Performance
In addition to these assurance-related efforts, we still need to work on improving the performance of the implementation. We are currently running the system with the test key on a 13-node subnet. For the production key, we decided to start with a 34-node subnet for the security / decentralization we want to have. This has a major implication on performance, i.e., it will be quite a bit slower there. In order to reach, what we think is an acceptable level of performance, we need to put some more thinking and engineering effort into getting good-enough performance on such larger subnet.
We will keep you posted on the progress!
B.t.w., user @flyq from our community has (against all warnings) already taken the risk to perform a Bitcoin mainnet transaction with the threshold ECDSA test key. After manually crafting a bitcoin transaction to transfer the funds his canister has received back out of the IC again, no Bitcoin was lost and this was the first successful threshold ECDSA-based Bitcoin Mainnet transaction roundtrip on the IC ever! Congratulations!
The warning still applies to not attach any value to the current t-ECDSA test key. Any experiments are at your own risk if you choose to ignore this warning.
So weāre looking at around November 2022 now? This is a big change in timeline compared to what weāve all been told so far, is the 2-3 month timeline based on a new assessment?
Do I need to enable something in the local replica to use this feature? Iām getting āNo route to canister aaaaa-aaā when calling ecdsa_public_key
Indeed, this is very much a pity and I want to apologize for the inconvenience, but here are two key reasons why we cannot release the GA version now:
We need to get performance to an acceptable level for 34-node or larger subnets. We can currently do 1.5 signatures/s on a 13-node subnet and performance decreases faster than linear with the replication factors. Thus, engineering has to solve some challenge here which does take some time. The performance was impossible to assess upfront, therefore this is a new work item that we could not plan for in any way.
We need another security audit, which must be done on a final version of the code, if there are too many changes after it, itās meaningless.
We need to do further testing and reviewing the code ourselves in order to make sure things are as they should be.
If we would release a production key now, it would make moving ahead with optimizations much harder or impossible for the case that optimizations change certain aspects of the protocol. And we cannot start the security review before the code is stable after the optimizations, as otherwise the review would be rather worthless.
Regarding the security-related items, let me quote @mparikhās comment from the Bitcoin thread:
In this game, āonly the paranoid surviveā.
How true, we must not take a risk here and release prematurely without the assurance steps we have in mind. Secure must be a top priority for a cryptographic feature like this one.
And w.r.t. performance, we would like to at least get close to 1 signature per second on the large subnet, which would likely be good enough for a first GA release.
Hope this explains a little better why we must do some more work before releasing the feature for production.
Do you have the latest SDK installed? Seems like you might be on an older version that does not have the feature (auto-)enabled yet. On the latest SDK in should just work (it is always enabled).
Wowā¦that is slower than I expected ā¦while acknowledging that youāre doing something amazing, difficult, and novel, what kind of costs are we expecting to call this function? Seems like it could be expensive and might restrict its usage.
It looks like currently, weāre looking at using the system subnet to do theseā¦do we expect it to scale horizontally eventually where we can add more t-ecdsa-specific subnets to enable lots of sig/sec?
Performance wise, this is just where you get with this complex kind of protocols. However, the crypto and consensus teams are now spending lots of effort on increasing performance, looking, for example, at measures such as batch verification for artifacts used in the protocol. We are confident to be able to bring this to an acceptable level of performance, but that is what takes time.
We will deploy the production release initially on one 34-node signing subnet and the NNS for key backup.
A scale-out architecture by using k signing subnets is supported by most parts of the architecture already. What would be missing in case we want to enable that in the future, is a deterministic load balancing algorithm in the message routing layer so that signing requests can be transparently dispatched to a signing subnet.
Yes, it was! We could not anticipate what the performance of the protocol would be in practice. It comprises so many parts that it was completely infeasible to estimate this from the protocol specification accurately. Once we were running it first with all sub-features enabled on actual subnets, we realized that we will need to spend quite some effort in optimizing the performance of the protocol.
ā¦while acknowledging that youāre doing something amazing, difficult, and novel, what kind of costs are we expecting to call this function? Seems like it could be expensive and might restrict its usage.