We are thrilled to announce that DeGate has successfully completed the Trusted Setup Multi-Party Computation (MPC) ceremony. DeGate is a trustless Order Book DEX trading protocol that utilizes ZK-Rollup technology. The Trusted Setup is a crucial and necessary procedure to activate the protocol on the mainnet.

What is a Trusted Setup Ceremony?

DeGate utilizes zk-SNARKS, which relies on a common reference string (CRS) as a public parameter for proving & verifying validity proofs. The CRS is a set of random values that are used by multiple parties to generate cryptographic keys or to execute cryptographic protocols. The security of the entire proving system hinges on the correct and secure setup of the CRS.

In the Trusted Setup Ceremony, DeGate employed the multi-party computation (MPC) technique, which involved several participants who each contributed random elements to collaboratively construct the CRS. The success of this technique depends on participants keeping their input (the random elements they contributed) concealed. In fact, honest participants should delete their ‘toxic waste’ right away. The protocol remains secure as long as at least one person deletes his/her ‘toxic waste’ properly. On Apr 8,2023, DeGate concluded the Trusted Setup Ceremony with necessary keys for DeGate protocol were successfully generated.

Phases

DeGate’s Trusted Setup Ceremony consisted of two phases.

Phase 1 is the Perpetual Powers of Tau Ceremony that can be continually on-going and used by all circuits. DeGate initiated Phase 1 on Mar 5, 2023. We committed the phase 1 contribution with a random beacon using the Bitcoin block hash #779277 as announced on Twitter.

Phase 2 is circuit-specific. DeGate commenced the Phase 2 on Mar 22, 2023, starting with participant #71 (Edward) from phase 1(https://github.com/weijiekoh/perpetualpowersoftau).

The ceremony started with coordinator Berg Jefferson picking a response file from the phase 1 ceremony. The coordinator used this to generate the initial parameters for all circuits in the phase 2 ceremony and publish it in a publicly accessible repository (https://github.com/degatedev/trusted_setup).

The ceremony occurred in sequential rounds. Each participant performed one round at a time. Each participant downloaded a file to run some computations taking around 14 hours to complete on a modern cloud server. The result is a new file including the participant’s contribution. The participant then shared this new file and submitted a signed attestation, which is a cryptographic proof of his/her work. The coordinator verified the output results and informed the hash value for the next participant. This process was repeated for every participant. Once the last participant has completed the computation, a parallel verification of all participants’ outputs are executed by using the same number of machines as the number of participants. This thorough verification process helps confirm the correctness and security of the Trusted Setup Ceremony.

To add an extra layer of security and randomness, we pre-announced on Twitter the Bitcoin hash #783765 as the parameter for the final beacon contribution.

After all the participants have completed their contributions and the final beacon has been introduced, the Proving Key (pk) and Verifying Key (vk) were generated from the combined contributions. These keys were exported and made available for use within the DeGate protocol. This marked the successful completion of DeGate’s Trusted Setup Ceremony!

We are honored to have Guoyu, Shannon Ewing, David Mihal, Toghrul Maharramov and Gulu as participants in the ceremony. Our Trusted Setup was completed with their contributions.

The community can verify their signed attestation file in this github folder(https://github.com/degatedev/trusted_setup/tree/master/signed_attestation). At the same time, we have made the participants’ contribution files publicly available at this cloud storage. The community can verify the correctness of each participant’s contribution using the verification steps outlined at https://github.com/degatedev/trusted_setup/blob/master/Coordinator.md#verify-the-contribution-file-of-every-participant. Moreover, based on these files, the community can also export the Proving Key (pk) and Verifying Key(vk), and verify vk against the configuration in the DeGate mainnet smart contracts.

What’s Next

The Trusted Setup ceremony’s conclusion paved the way for our beta mainnet launch. Very soon you will be able to use DeGate, the trustless Order Book DEX that lets you Trade Easy, Sleep Easy.

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