Please describe your proposed solution.

The final goal of this proposal is to have the necessary consensus module that can be re-used for different, purpose-specific, nodes; and (alongside the network and ledger proposals) eventually a fully functional alternative implementation of the haskell cardano-node.

The realization of the consensus module will come with a node prototype (meant to testnet use only) thanks the realization of the network and ledger proposals.

Primary target of the project are both developers and stake pool operator, and through them any possible user that interacts, directly or indirectly with the Cardano protocol.

Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community.

Client diversity is crucial for the long term security of the protcol.

Every user of Cardano is relying, directly or indirectly, on a cardano-node in order to interact with the blockchain (submitting transactions, querying data, etc…)

So far the only aviable implementation is the Haskell one by IOG, making the node a potential single point of failure, and often accessed via centralized servers (because there is not really an alternative).

This module, alongside the network and ledger ones, will play an important role in the creation of alternative clients and light clients, with the goal of improving the network and end user securtiy.

What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

Michele Nuzzi has been part of the Cardano ecosystem at the beginnign as a single stake pool operator and later as developer. In this time he wrote and still maintains numerous dependecy free typescript libraries that require a low level understanding of the Cardano protocol.

A non-exhaustive list list of some of the projects would be:

• plu-ts: a typescript framework for the creation of Cardano Smart contracts
• plutus-machine: typescript library for the evaluation of contracts off-chain
• cardano-ledger-ts: collection of classes and functions for Cardano specific data types and respective serialization and deserialization in CBOR format.
• ouroboros-miniprotocols-ts: library for low level interactions with the cardano-node based on the ouroboros mini protocols specificaiton.

What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

mempool

>Upstream Peers Adapter*

aka. Connection manager, chain sync and all that stuff

*necessarily dependent on the networking module

>ChainDB (Immutable, Volatile, LedgerState)

>Chain selection (depends on Milestone 3)

>> note on the milestones above

> most of them are based on the ouroboros-consensus documentation

Deliverables of the proposal are:

1) Typecript ouroboros-consensus module

2) cardano-node prototype*

> *The deliverable is strictly dependend on the approval of the ledger and networking proposals

Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

1) Michele Nuzzi

• X.com (former Twitter)

In the event multiple proposals will be approved qualified personale will be hired to guarantee the successful delivery of all of the approved proposals.

The profile required for such postion will be of a Senior Typescript developer with solid understanding of the different Javascript runtimes and relative main APIs (Web Workers, WebSockets, etc. for Browsers and worker_threads, os, fs, etc. for Node as well as other possible runtimes such as Bun.js or Deno)

Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

At a price of 0.3828 USD per ADA the estimated cost corresponds to roughly 300'940 ADA, so we round down to 300'000 ADA to meet the challenge requirement.

The expected time to completion of the project is of 8 months considering 1 engineer for 8 hours per day for 30 days per month

60 $/h x 8h/d x 30d/mo x 8mo = 115200 $

that converted to ADA is roughly 300'940 ADA (rounded down to meet the challenge requirements)

How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

The software generated by this proposal will likely run as part of the critical infrastructure that powers Cardano as a protocol.

The skills and knowledge required for the realization of this project are highly specialized hence the value for money should be fair.