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Vac 2024 Year in Review

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9 min read

In this post, we recap Vac's achievements in 2024 and look forward to 2025.

With 2024 now behind us and a new year ahead, Vac is proud to reflect on the milestones and breakthroughs that defined another year of researching and developing free and open digital public goods for the Institute of Free Technology and wider web3 ecosystem.

Vac comprises various subteams and service units, each with its own focus. Below, we celebrate each unit's achievements and look forward to its 2025 plans.

Nescience​

Nescience is our state separation architecture that aims to enable private transactions and provide a general-purpose execution environment for classical applications.

Highlights​

This year, the Nescience state separation architecture moved from exploration to real progress, taking significant steps towards building a functional and reliable system. The team focused on turning ideas into something real, testing the proposed architecture, and understanding its strengths and weaknesses.

We also made progress on the essential parts of NSSA’s system, including:

  • Key protocol for secure key management
  • Execution types and circuits for reliable computation
  • UTXO specification to manage state transitions effectively
  • Cryptography module to ensure privacy and security

Looking forward​

In 2025, the Nescience team plans to double down on what works, fix what doesn’t, and push NSSA closer to real-world use.

  • Sandboxed testnet data analysis – the sandboxed testnet will be our primary data source that we will analyse to identify issues, limitations, and areas for improvement.
  • Expanding the node – expand sandboxed components into a full node implementation with rigorous testing and iterative optimization (to bridge the gap between proof of concept and production readiness).
  • Finalizing the architecture and RFC – after completing NSSA’s architecture, we will draft an RFC to ensure transparency and enable greater collaboration with the broader ecosystem.
  • Testing real-life scenarios – applying NSSA to diverse, practical use cases to assess its adaptability, performance, and impact.
  • Ongoing optimization – ensure NSSA is robust, efficient, and ready to scale.

Token Economics (TKE)​

The TKE Service Unit works closely with IFT portfolio projects to design and implement crypto-economic incentive structures.

Highlights​

  • Formalized and implemented Codex economic incentives in the Litepaper and simulations
  • Orchestrated Status Network incentive structure and smart contract implementation
  • Started building Nomos’s economic model
  • Consulted and provided analysis of incentives for the Logos Operators ordinals project
  • Drove discussions on the economic sustainability of Waku; helped define RLN membership and its payment mechanism

Looking forward​

In 2025, TKE will continue to support IFT portfolio projects, working toward economic sustainability while strengthening relationships within the organization. Additionally, the service unit aims to continue building its external reputation through partnerships and publications of relevant work on the Vac forum.

Quality Assurance (QA)​

The QA Service Unit focuses on the development and execution of comprehensive test plans, including implementing unit and interoperability testing.

Highlights​

  • Matured Waku interoperability testing framework with coverage for all major protocols and features
  • Began collaboration with Nomos, contributing to unit and integration testing
  • Partnered with the Status team to test message reliability under unstable network conditions

Looking forward​

  • Extend collaboration with the Waku team on go-waku bindings and message reliability testing
  • Cement working relationship with the Nomos team through the building of an E2E testing framework for higher-level node validation
  • Work closely with Status’s QA team to enhance the functional testing framework
  • Continue work on nim-libp2p testing
  • Expand collaboration to additional projects

RFC​

The RFC Service Unit takes on the responsibility of shepherding and editing specifications for IFT projects. The unit acts as a linchpin for ensuring standardized and interoperable protocols within the IFT ecosystem.

Highlights​

  • Working to implement RFC culture across the IFT ecosystem
  • Began editorial work for several IFT portfolio projects: Status, Nomos, Waku, and Codex.
  • Reworked our standards with regard to writing RFCs to a consensus-oriented specification system

Looking forward​

  • Continue to implement RFC culture across the IFT ecosystem
  • Broaden the number of RFCs produced – particularly for IFT portfolio projects nearing public releases
  • Include new projects with the rfc-index
  • Encourage external projects requiring RFCs to establish relationships with the service unit

Applied Cryptography and ZK (ACZ)​

The ACZ Service Unit focuses on cryptographic solutions and zero-knowledge proofs, enhancing the security, privacy, and trustworthiness of IFT portfolio projects and contributing to the overall integrity and resilience of the decentralized web ecosystem.

Highlights​

Looking forward​

  • Ensure libp2p mix protocol is production-ready and support with the publishing of a paper and blog posts
  • Ensure decentralized MLS is production-ready and support with the publishing of a paper and blog posts
  • Begin explorations of additional research topics
  • Release Zerokit v0.7 and future versions

P2P​

The P2P Service Unit specializes in peer-to-peer technologies and develops nim-libp2p, improves the libp2p GossipSub protocol, and assists IFT portfolio projects with the integration of P2P network layers.

Highlights​

Looking forward​

  • Add new features to nim-libp2p: QUIC transport, web transport
  • Update specifications for libp2p GossipSub, aiming to significantly improve its performance

Distributed Systems Testing (DST)​

The DST Service Unit’s primary objective is to assist IFT portfolio projects in understanding the scaling behavior of their nodes within larger networks. By conducting thorough regression testing, the DST unit helps ensure the reliability and stability of projects.

Highlights​

  • DST compute resources transitioned from a hosted environment to a dedicated Vac Lab, enabling better customization of resources and adding significantly more compute power – enabled much higher and more stable simulations (several hundred nodes to several thousand) and enhanced environmental control.
  • Maintained monthly regression simulations for both Waku and Nim-libp2p, helping us to detect several issues and ensure that future versions do not introduce new ones.
  • Successfully simulated and obtained results for all Waku protocols, relaying feedback to the team.

Looking forward​

  • More testing and simulations for Codex and Nomos
  • Develop useful tools for all IFT portfolio projects – e.g. a Log Parser tool and data dashboard

Nim​

Several IFT portfolio projects use the Nim ecosystem for its efficiency. The Nim Service Unit is responsible for the development and maintenance of Nim tooling.

Highlights​

  • Released Nim-libp2p (v1.7.1, v1.7.0, v1.6.0, v1.5.0, v1.4.0, v1.3.0, v1.2.0)
  • Introduced SAT solver to the Nimble package manager that significantly improves dependency resolution
  • Nim VSCode Extension
  • Stabilized Nim Language Server

Smart Contracts (SC)​

Vac's Smart Contracts Service Unit ensures the smart contracts deployed across the various IFT portfolio projects are secure, robust, and aligned with project requirements.

Highlights​

  • Deployed the SNT staking protocol testnet following Status's governance vote to develop SNT staking and Status Network
  • Wrote specifications for Codex's architectural components and Status's staking contracts
  • Delivered several learn-up sessions on a variety of topics for IFT contributors, including:
    • Stealth addresses
    • Tokenized vaults
    • Rental NFTs
    • Merkle trees
    • Account abstraction
    • EVM deep dive

Looking forward​

  • Deploy the SNT staking protocol on the Status Network testnet
  • Encourage community security audits via contests
  • Provide smart contract consultation services for IFT portfolio products
  • Engage in more learn-up sessions to promote org-wide knowledge sharing.

Heading into 2025​

This year has seen Vac involved with many research, development, and testing undertakings in support of IFT portfolio projects. The digital public goods that emerge from our efforts not only support the organization itself but are open and free to use by any project that would benefit.

As we move into 2025, we aim to nurture a stronger RFC culture across the IFT to encourage greater collaboration and knowledge sharing among portfolio projects. Our goal is to serve as an internal conduit of expertise within the organization, supported by a strong RFC culture, maintaining a repository of internal knowledge creation, and identifying and facilitating IFT project synergies. Such an approach should lead to greater efficiencies across the organization.

We also aim to establish a diverse research community around Vac, and our efforts in this regard are already underway. In the final quarter of 2024, Vac stepped up its collaboration with the libp2p community and made a concerted effort to engage the community on the Vac forum. In 2025, we aim to continue working closely with those communities to which we already have ties, such as the libp2p, Ethereum, and Nim ecosystems.

We look forward to continuing our journey with you!

Follow Vac on X, join us in the Vac Discord, or take part in the discussions on the Vac forum to stay up to date with our research and development progress.