Brainstorming for Namada's roadmap ⚡

Technical Zone
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There are many possibilities for Namada’s near (12 month) future and the more ultimate (~5 year) vision for Namada. We (Knowable) have been thinking about this for some time now, and I know that Heliax (esp @brentstone @cwgoes) has as well. @Veildev has likely been thinking about this, probably other key contributing teams and individuals (esp @Daniel) have as well.

I wrote this “roadmap story” in July of… 2023 :sweat_smile: In spirit it’s still relevant, but of course lots has changed.

As a community we’ve talked about elements of this at length, and wouldn’t it be great to weave these elements together into a single technical vision and roadmap?
Together as a community :blush:

I can talk at length about this, but I’m curious to know what others have been thinking about :brain: :zap:

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Been about three weeks (:sweat_smile:), so I’ll share the element that I see as :key:

We (Knowable) believe that Namada’s technical roadmap should focus on enabling a strong Shielded Actions developer community. Namada should be the easiest way for developers to integrate programmable privacy into our surrounding ecosystems.

Shielded Actions are a fundamentally new building block in the broader space. With IBC, privacy isn’t just an add-on, but a core, composable component. If we make it easy for developers to experiment with and deploy Shielded Actions, we have a big opportunity to catalyze innovation across many ecosystems.

Telling people to protect their privacy is like telling them to eat their vegetables :broccoli:
If this new superpower enables a mechanism that is :sparkles: attractive :sparkles: and goes viral, teams from communities will come to us to integrate, if we are the best path to do it quickly.

Shielded Actions work now (ask @spork.Knowable!). An iterative approach:

  1. Seed the ecosystem :seedling:
    Run initial Shielded Action workshops and bounty campaigns focused on simple but useful mechanisms—small building blocks that developers can remix into larger applications
  2. Dev adoption loop :arrows_counterclockwise:
    If one of these mechanisms gains traction, we ensure that Namada’s dev community, SDK, and integrations make it trivial for other projects to adopt
  3. Expanding reach :octopus:
    Integrate Namada with key blockchain ecosystems that are privacy-conscious or have natural use cases for shielded transactions
  4. Building dev infra :building_construction:
    a) A reference implementation of a useful Shielded Action (eg. shielded Osmosis swaps)
    b) A well-documented SDK (Knowledge Base) that makes it easy to build with Namada
    c) Front-end reference implementations to lower adoption friction
    d) Dev relations to help cultivate our dev community

(btw, @spork.Knowable has created some comprehensive testnet automation that can help accelerate development)

Would love to hear what others think!

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tl;dr

  • native bridges = more liquidity, faster flows
  • Anoma-centric roadmap = verify Anoma intents
  • service commitments = Anoma service provider
  • improve UX = better wallets

1. Native bridges

  • Ethereum
  • Solana

this is where the bulk of the assets in “inter-chain” are. Relying on third party bridges will only get you meh distribution plus introduces additional trust assumptions without much benefit. WIth native bridges you can create a liquidity network on top for fast “intent-based” bridging; cf. across, DLN, etc. There are ways to IBC in the VM instead of directly in the Node client but its messy according to people I know who have tried.

2. Anoma Protocol Adaptor for Namada

  • verify Anoma formatted intents
  • if Namada is successful in attracting liquidity then Anoma out of the box can have more assets to work with
  • once the controller system is live, then assets can move b/w instances of Anoma.

3. Service commitment provider for Anoma

  • Namada validators could provide;
    • compute
    • storage
    • bandwidth
    • ordering

In particular Namada could provide consensus on demand for say a batch swap application that requires consensus over a batch of intents before they are solved.

4. Embedded Wallets / Smart Wallets / MPC wallet

  • Point blank, We need to improve the Wallet UX, it is not acceptable for 2025.

There are additional things, but this is my wish list. Remember that in order for Namada to be successful, we need to grow the size of the shielded set. Without that, our network operators will not be profitable and the token will be risking death spiral on a long enough time horizon - see various Cosmos chains as an example.

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part II

tl;dr

  • Tendermint optimizations = 500 ms block times and other stuff.
  • Ferveo = censorship resistance
  • Protocol owned liquidity = on and off ramps + community alignment

5. Tendermint optimizations.

  • One of the features of Tendermint is fast finality. This is optimal for coming to consensus over a batch of intents as discussed above.
  • In addition, it makes finality over the bridging in and out faster as well.
  • you can get “pre-confirmations” with vote extensions as discussed by @ValarDragon during Devmos 2024 in New York.

My takes on what Cosmos should do

  • Get Tendermint block times down to 3 latency communications
  • Keep iterating on vote extensions for
    Improved short term CR inclusion
  • Encrypted mempools
  • Get user state results ready upon 2/3rd pre voting
  • Make fast geo-distributed DA layers, and provable DA ingestion
  • Then we can do way more actions safely in the mempool for higher throughput!
  • Either Pipeline Tendermint or Bullshark
  • Pre-confirmations w/ vote extensions

6. Ferveo

  • A synchronous Distributed Key Generation protocol for front-running protection on public blockchains.
  • Solvers could run Ferveo over a batch of intents for censorship resistance purposes. @cwgoes points this out at Research Day:

EXAMPLE: BATCHING (“PENUMBRA-ON-ANOMA”)
• Consume tokens to create (threshold-encrypted)
resources
• Those resources are threshold-decrypted next
round
• Those resources can only be consumed in a batch
• Checks fairness condition (optimal arbitrage)

  • Namada as a controller that orders Namada native resources by ordering batches of tx candidates my also benefit from pre-consensus shielding post consensus reveal.

7. Protocol owned Liquidity

  • Namada has an opportunity to own LP shares of NAM-XYZ tokens, XYZ being any mutually beneficial liquidity relationship, some obvious examples could be ATOM, ZEC, TIA, ETH, BTC, SOL… To start, you likely want to focus on only two pools.
  • this directly benefits the protocol because it can guarantee liquidations if NAM is used as collateral in future CDP style applications,
  • Allowing token holders to join and rage-quit gracefully is important for stability of the social layer in the long- run.
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Hey, I’d like to chime in and write about what I personally have been thinking about in terms of the Namada roadmap. The following represents my own thoughts (not as a representative of Heliax) on a 1-year roadmap currently.

PGF proposals before Phase 5

This is low-hanging fruit that I’d like to mention first. The Donor Drop PGF proposal is officially on-chain as Proposal #5. After this, I’d like to see some retroactive PGF be distributed to community members that have been instrumental in important activities in mainnet before Phase 5:

  • Builders of the Donor Drop infra
  • Block explorer operators
  • IBC relayers
    • Would like to use PGF as a way to subsidize IBC relaying fees for the initial set of operators
    • Do this after Phase 3 (and maybe 4) to get a clearer picture of who is doing the bulk of the relaying

After Phase 5, I’d love to see some development to grow the PGF module in Namada and experiment more with our PGF system. This is pretty open-ended, and there are several issues and feature requests on the Namada github for improvements to the PGF system. Perhaps @Gavin could elaborate more on this if he has ideas.

Osmosis Shielded Swaps: Flagship Initial Integration

The Heliax team has already been busy at work on this over the last couple months. They have recently implemented an IBC packet-forwarding middleware that allows Namada to talk to CosmWasm cross-chain swaps contracts on Osmosis: GitHub - anoma/ibc-middleware: IBC middleware implementations, augmenting ibc-rs.

The middleware repo is now published to https://crates.io/ and is currently undergoing an audit from Informal Systems. The software is actually included in the current Namada software (v1.1.1) and can be used from the CLI! There are likely to be updates to come following the audit.

Remaining unfinished business for the shielded swaps is to create the UI. We are envisioning building a UI into Namadillo that would be accessible as a new left-hand tab (below MASP, IBC, Transfer). The Heliax team has begun designs but has yet to begin the front-end implementation. Of course, shielded swaps are permissionless - you and anyone in the community can build your own UI too!

Connect Namada to the larger crypto-sphere

We envision Namada as an important tool and primitive for the crypto space beyond the existing IBC ecosystem. As such, it is critical to connect Namada to other ecosystems like the EVM and SVM. We would like to prioritize expanding bridging services beyond IBC, which would allow even more projects to integrate with us (e.g. shielded swaps beyond IBC). In this future, Namada could act as a shielded swap aggregator, where users can keep their assets shielded at rest on Namada, and when they want to swap, Namada can help source the best available liquidity and prices from whichever chains to which Namada is connected. There are several options we have thought about:

  • Wormhole integration: we are currently exploring the technical requirements for Namada support within this ecosystem, which could give us access to certain SVM and EVM chains
  • IBC Eureka: an option for upgrading IBC when Eureka launches in order to gain EVM access
  • Revival of the native Ethereum bridge

New Browser Wallets

It would be great to get Namada support in existing wallets that support the IBC ecosystem in general, such as Keplr and Leap wallets. It would be great to get a sense from the community which wallets would be most desirable for integrations.

Mobile Wallet

This would be a fantastic development that would enable Namada to have reach as a payments platform as well. There are currently two fledgling projects to make mobile Namada wallets, with one approaching a proof-of-concept demo.

Shielded Sync Fuzzy Message Detection (FMD)

Some cryptographic improvements to shielded-sync that some Heliax cryptographers and engineers have begun working on. This could significantly speed up sync times and thus significantly improve the MASP UX. More details can be found in the public discussion on the Anoma Reasearch forum: FMD + TEE for private state sync proposal - Shielded State Sync - Anoma | Research & Development Forum.

New incentivized assets for shielded rewards as a way of introducing Namada to new communities

We have some ideas we have been working on / projects we have been chatting with, but I’d rather not make them public here just quite yet. I’d definitely love to see some community input on which projects might be preferences and good options for attracting new audiences to Namada.

Shielded airdrop for Zcash holders

There has been some R&D on this front and we are currently awaiting feedback from the Zcash team and community: Status update & RFC: ZEC-NAM shielded airdrop protocol - Ecosystem Updates - Zcash Community Forum.

Shielded payments for decentralized VPNs

I think this is a really cool idea for a shielded action that makes so much sense: provide end-to-end privacy for setting up a decentralized VPN. @Daniel from Mandragora made a forum post about this some time ago: Shielded actions - Subscription to a dVPN node on Sentinel. Perhaps there are other projects too that could integrate.

Shielded swaps for aggregators like Squid Router

Similar to the points made above on expanding bridging solutions for Namada and turning Namada into a kind of shielded swap aggregator. It might be worthwhile and quicker to also integrate with Squid router.

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One of the advantages on integrating a solution for a dVPN app based on Sentinel framework is that there are already a considerable number of them, i.e. like 8-9 and more coming. So, building an integration for one of them it could potentially serve for the rest. Refer to dVPN Apps | Sentinel Docs

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Some things I would be interested in include:

This should be a priority. Mobile is the future.

As a core contributor of ZecHub, I think the first shielded airdrop will bring attention, liquidity, and developers into both ecos.

ZecHub already has a running bounty program for Zcash and would like to expand to offer NAM bounties. This would be a great way to generate more shielded txs whilst educating new folks.

Some other ideas I havent seen mentioned:

  • DaoDao support and or fork.

    • Low key think DaoDao hasn’t received the respect it deserves in helping diverse groups learn and use DAO’s both in Cosmos and outside. ZecHub uses DaoDao exclusively for its easy to use multisig governance.

  • Integration into Penumbra

    • Osmosis is great, but I think we should focus on shielded technology first and Penumbra is a great place to start
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Thanks all for the contributions so far! :tada:

I have a few ideas to write up myself, but first I wanted to ask a few questions:

Do you have a few examples of wallets that you think have the best UX these days, that we could learn from?

This is a good data point to have. What kind of DaoDao support would you like to see / what kind of DaoDao support would be useful for ZecHub specifically? Do you think that there’s any demand for “shielded DAOs”?

What kind of integration with Penumbra do you think would be most compelling?

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Honestly, imo, with the product Namada has, almost anything will work on top. That is to say its a frickign awesome product.

Speaking from experience, most chains that come and go unnoticed with large promises - are chains that couldn’t deliver their message across to a large on chain economical force, that could in turn stabilize the economy.

Of course, im referring to community. Including devs especially and a strong KOL in privacy presence. I think that any roadmap should include a good chunk relating to attracting such influence in the privacy sector across the space (for now, its not yet there. I interview enough privacy KOLs on my cast - not many heard about Namada ((oh yes, I preach sometime lol)), which tells me that there is still work to be done here).

I also think that we should think about attracting enough onchain economical capital to keep Namada stable during hard times. This also means growing the community, especially with devs that have cross chain followings and can build and attract the community in question.

I believe that there always should be a focus on key events that help to shape the foundation layer (community and resource). This imo, will help to provide some long term prosperity. From our side, this is what we do. Try to focus on attracting cross chain communities and aim at building cross chain products.

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They have an Apps section that I think would be neat use-case for voting. I imagine being able to connect to namadillo for example using the ZecHub multisig via DaoDao if we hold NAM on it.

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Native Namada cross chain support. This is how we use the Osmosis dex for example if we need to swap using our Juno based multisig.

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Once NAM is transferable, support for the NAM token on Osmosis so it will “show up” in our treasury

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Notice the icon on the bottom right corners of each icons.

Honestly I think listing on Penumbra first before any other DEX would be quite symbolic and benefit both ecosystems. We could for example have zero trading fees between the pairs for the first year.

I think shielded voting is much more interesting and would love to experiment with it. Either via DaoDao or some fork. :hot_pepper:

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I wish we could do away with browser extensions, because it is a lot to ask a Metamask user to also install Keplr and the Namada Keychain, but as far as I know that has not been solved even by relatively simple protocols so far.

For instance, zkSync is experimenting with making Web3 feel more like web 2.0, eliminating keys, approvals and gas fees.

Demo: https://nft.zksync.dev/

Video: https://x.com/EthereumDenver/status/1894458651303448673

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I’m speaking about both Namada and Anoma here but the one application I would most like to see come to life is, at it’s core, a shielded pool of all possible intents that allows for users to spend a currency of their choice, in a foreign location, and allow the recipient of said funds to recieve the currency of their choice.

Example:

Person 1 goes to a 7/11 in Japan and using a mobile app pays for 3 steamed pork buns in Swiss Francs. They do the payment using an Apple Pay style application that supports tap-payments.

Person 2 recieves the payment just like any other payment, without any hardware upgrade requirements, in Japanese Yen.

Meanwhile the intents pool has resolved n number of user intents in order to settle this payment in real-time.

All parties end the transaction in a win/win scenario, while retaining their privacy. :handshake::handshake::handshake:

I see this as the end-game of payments. Being stuck having to have physical notes in the current country’s currency that I’m visiting can be painful (and expensive if you want to exchange back out of physical notes/coins back to your home currency upon leaving). Digital payments are less painful but are far from private and also expensive typically due to subpar fx swap rates.

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Yes, this was one of our original product ideas in conceiving of these projects, actually (especially @awa’s).

There’s a fair amount that can be accomplished in this direction with just shielded swaps, where you (the user) would hold assets in the MASP, and swap them (to whatever currency required) and send them (to the vendor) when paying. I think the primary lift here will be on integrations from the merchant side – very few merchants accept any kind of crypto payments directly right now.

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Yeah, the integrations is certainly the primary lift here, I agree. I think there’s maybe a better way than integrating direct with merchants and it’s by providing the SDK/MASP infrastructure for the payment providers to tap into in order to handle the currency switching themselves via a Stripe-like API. This prevents them from having to hold collateral and be an LP for the trade like I assume they do now.

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Penumbra’s Liquidity Tournament incentives are coming. Could we add NAM incentives for UM:NAM liquidity? Let’s work with Penumbra to add NAM to the UM:NAM liquidity pool.

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I don’t know whether Penumbra supports (or will support) non-native token incentives, that’s a good question to ask them directly if you have contacts there. Connecting Namada and Penumbra – and creating an UM:NAM pool – should be possible, I think someone will need to test out IBC relaying though (support for both Namada and Penumbra was recently merged upstream in Hermes, but I’m not sure if they’ve been tested together).

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By the way, Abstract Chain is a full scale implementation of zkSync’s account abstraction features: https://portal.abs.xyz/

You can sign-up with an e-mail address, Google Account, or a passkey to generate a new Abstract wallet.

(It is also possible to sign-up with an existing Metamask/Rabby wallet, but you will still get a new address. One caveat of this simplified on-boarding is if you were to bridge from Abstract to another EVM L2, you will not be able to access those funds!)

Once there are funds in the Abstract wallet, you can trade them in the portal without any approvals or signatures. You can also log-in to dapps within the Abstract ecosystem using the Abstract wallet, which works without a browser extension (unless that was your sign-up method). Not everything is super smooth yet, but it will be interesting to see if this approach manages to on-board new people.

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Going to add a small thing about governance (BTW you guys are lucky to have @Gavin). I think its important to include governance development in the roadmap.

This means imo 2 things. A: continue working on governance experiments that help to motivate voters (there are some examples, with longer vote periods, various prop types, additional rewards, betting markets, etc). And, B: continue working with the community in the same way as on the start of the network.

I believe this means that (im a long term advocate of this, yes) it would make sense to set aside an R&D / Community Pool part of the budget just for this. Im long dying to see a chain, where proposals arent just created by team and validators, but rather suggested to the team or validators by gathered feedback from community (as in the prop is build down up).

I dont know if this means creating working groups or whatever. In all honesty, I aint a huge fan of onchain multisigs proposals (where funds go from onchain CP to multisig - seems like backwards decentralization). Yet, I do think that this type of group could exist if they had left decision making back to chain governance.

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