Last Week: attend discussions on the post-quantum transition, privacy mechanisms, and network issues. Evaluated decentralized finance (DeFi) trading architectures for time-locked Neptune coins, weighing bearer asset designs against protocol hard fork designs.
Coming Week: Accelerate commit velocity on the DeFi branch now that desktop access is restored.
Thorkil Værge
Last Week: Optimized the x \mapsto x^7 operation in Triton VM by deferring intermediate modulo operations; implemented AVX-512 instructions accelerating hashing rates by 25% on Zen 4 and 40% on Zen 5 processors (reducing canonical proving benchmarks from 14.5s to 14.0s and increasing guessing rates by 40%); resolved three major stability issues on the epsilon branch following an audit report.
Coming Week: Review audit report to extract relevant findings, update the epsilon branch with these improvements, and activate/merge the epsilon branch at block height 61,60062,000.
3. Technical Discussion
Triton VM Arithmetic & Hashing Optimizations: Proving performance and instruction throughput saw notable gains through algebraic and vectorization improvements. Optimizing the x \mapsto x^7 computation by delaying intermediate modulo operations, combined with AVX-512 vector instruction support, boosted hashing rates by 25% on Zen 4 and 40% on Zen 5 microarchitectures. This reduced canonical benchmark proving time from 14.5 seconds down to 14.0 seconds (a 6% proving acceleration). Additionally, Triton VM guessing rates increased by 40%, directly helping mitigate testnet mining centralization.
Epsilon Branch Stabilization & Report Integration: Three critical stability bugs on the epsilon branch were resolved. With the delivery of the report from the LLM-assisted soundness evaluation, findings are being analyzed and integrated to ensure full cryptographic and protocol soundness ahead of deployment. Activation is on track for block height 61,600 62,000 within the next week.
DeFi Architecture & Bearer Asset Mechanics: Insights from Bitcoin Research Week informed ongoing designs for decentralized finance on Neptune Cash. The team analyzed methods for trading time-locked Neptune coins via tradable bearer assets, which eliminates dependency on coinbase inputs but carries the trade-off of constraining experimental flexibility. In contrast, dedicated hard fork architectures would streamline DeFi primitives natively, though at the cost of managing broader system-wide transition fallout.
4. Updates and Announcements
Epsilon activation is scheduled to deploy at block height 61,600 62,000 within the next week.