ANOMA REQUEST FOR COMMENT (RFC)

TLDR; pls contribute to the Anoma specs.

WHY THOUGH? Our work on Anoma’s architecture specifications has been open-source for more than 2 years and it has gone through many many iterations. So far, the main direct contributor has been Heliax, the first research and core development team in the Anoma community. The implementation of the Anoma architecture is spec-first, meaning that while development is happening in parallel, Anoma core devs use the specifications as the canonical point of reference.

With the RFC program, we want to encourage individuals and groups outside of Heliax to review and – criticize – the design of Anoma, so we can verify its soundness. A second goal is to check if we’re missing anything: Are there fundamental flaws in the overarching design? Are we missing any primitive? Are there any blind spots in any specific primitive? And so on.

The scope of Anoma’s architecture is quite broad: from p2p and distributed systems, through compilers and languages, cryptography beyond ZKPs, mechanism and economic design, … – in addition to their combinations and intersections. On top of that, we need to ensure that the interfaces and properties make sense and are useful to the first intent-centric application developers.

The scope and goals of Anoma are ambitious, we know. We’re also aware that standardization is primarily led by social consensus. This makes it even more critical for us to seek feedback on Anoma.

WHAT? This is a RFC on Anoma’s specifications, meaning that we welcome contributions directly into the Anoma specifications. We’re currently doing some updating and cleaning up, but the latest version of the specs will be released under specs.anoma.net. We view the specs as a public good, and contributions will be rewarded.

WHO CAN PARTICIPATE? We welcome literally anyone to contribute. But here’s who we think might find Anoma’s specs interesting:

  • Protocol researchers and developers
  • Decentralized application prototypers and builders
  • Researchers across distributed systems, compilers/PLT, cryptography, mechanism design, economics, etc.
  • Game theorists

WHEN? The program will start sometime in Fall 2023. More details and specifics will be announced in the upcoming weeks.

(The best way to stay informed is by following @anoma)

Apriori, Christopher, Awa