[SMT] SMT Compute Units 👶 Step

[Olshansk]

Objective

De-risk the ability to have compute units in Shannon.

Origin Document

The Relay Mining whitepaper alludes to supporting general purpose "compute units" by having leaves of different weights.

The Lava Litepaper discusses compute units and keeper that uses them is available here but it is hard to determine how they're available. They show the number of compute units used by their protocol here.

Alchemy's also discusses how they charge users using compute units, but all of it is centralized.

Goals

• De-risk Shannon's ability to have future support for compute units in the future
• Prototype and learn what it would take to include compute units
• Start a discussion and thought process on what "compute units" mean in Shannon

Deliverables

• [ ] Choose a mechanism to prototype compute units. For example:
  • Relay Request / Response byte counts
  • Websockets (time open, amount of data sent, etc...)
  • Compute needed to process an RPC request
  • Hard-coded config per request type
• [ ] A PR that prototypes a simple example of compute units (i.e. one of the above) w/ a regression test

Non-goals / Non-deliverables

• A research/review of all other implementation/options in the ecosystem that support compute units
• General purpose support of all types of compute units
• A production-ready implementation of compute units
• Accounting for all problems and edge cases related to this problem

General deliverables

• [ ] Comments: Add/update TODOs and comments alongside the source code so it is easier to follow.
• [ ] Testing: Add new tests (unit and/or E2E) to the test suite.
• [ ] Makefile: Add new targets to the Makefile to make the new functionality easier to use.
• [ ] Documentation: Update architectural or development READMEs; use mermaid diagrams where appropriate.

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Creator: @Olshansk Co-Owners: @h5law

[Olshansk]

Quick update w/ a couple docs:

• @h5law put together the notion doc on compute units
• @Olshansk put together a supplemental notion doc on dynamic pricing

Both are under review and we'll keep posting updates.

[Olshansk]

Update:

• We put together the next steps document
• The GROVE team met to discuss ideas related to next steps, which is captured here

@h5law Can you link to the proposal we're putting together once it's ready? We'll be able to publish it publically as a document once we have a sufficient baseline.

[Olshansk]

Capturing links to a few of the existing docs on this work:

• Tokenomics Meeting
• Tokenomics (Part 2)
• Dynamic Pricing
• Compute Units
• (Brainstorming) Compute Units
• Next Steps (free marketplace and per-service relay pricing)

[Olshansk]

Closing this as something that will only be done post mainnet.