U.Today - Cardano founder has taken to X to express his excitement about a new paper release for Mithril, a Cardano scaling solution.
Mithril is a stake-based signature scheme and a protocol that improves the speed and efficiency of nodes' syncing times.
Mithril went live on Mainnet Beta in July and produced its first snapshot. Already, around 100 stake pools have contributed to the signing of Mithril certificates.
IOG researchers published the research paper "Mithril: Stake-based Threshold Multisignatures" in 2021, explaining how the protocol operates as a stake-based threshold signature scheme allowing for lightweight stake leveraging.
Explaining the Mithril 2 paper, , Input Output Global (IOG) CTO, explains that the recently released paper introduces new cryptographic techniques to prove knowledge of a large dataset without revealing it entirely.
It introduces a technique called approximate lower bound arguments, or ALBAs. The goal is to enable users to prove they have a large dataset without revealing the entire dataset. This is important in applications that need to prove many digital signatures from various people without displaying each signature.
The study demonstrates how ALBAs can be utilized for straight-line witness extraction in concise noninteractive knowledge arguments (SNARKs). When extracting witnesses from SNARKs, the prover's effort can be minimized, and shorter proofs can be obtained by utilizing an ALBA instead of a custom build.
Mithril signers have been deployed by around 80 SPOs since its mainnet launch in July, totaling over 1.5 billion in stake, and adoption continues to expand. Improvements to the download and extraction processes lowered the time required to bootstrap a node on a consumer-grade laptop to under 20 minutes.