Library

Tupelo Background Resources

Here is a collection of prior work that has influenced the design of the Tupelo platform, grouped into broad categories. Much of the work listed here has not directly contributed to the implementation of the protocol, but they're listed here anyway because they are relevant background knowledge to understand the details of Tupelo. The prior work listed here that has been integrated into the protocol has been modified for use in Tupelo because of the uniqueness of the platform.

Data Representation

• CBOR - Concise Binary Object Representation
  An extensible, schemaless binary data serialization format heavily inspired by JSON.
• IPLD - The data model of the content-addressable web
  A content addressed data format making use of namespaces and hash-based content identifiers to identify data across many hashing schemes, store data in many formats, and resolve that data across many protocols.
• Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs)
  W3C specification for a digital identifier format enabling unique identifiers without a centralized registry or identity provider.

Peer-to-Peer Messaging

• The Promise, and Limitations, of Gossip Protocols
  A primer describing peer-to-peer gossip protocols and the use-cases they are well suited for.
• What’s the Difference? Efficient Set Reconciliation without Prior Context
  Techniques to distribute data in a decentralized, peer-to-peer network with invertible Bloom filters to avoid unnecessary bandwidth usage by efficiently identifying differences between the data stored on different nodes to avoid sending data to a node that already has it.

Cryptography

• BLS signatures: better than Schnorr
  An in-depth primer on the basics of how BLS signatures work, how they can be used to efficiently combine and represent multiple cryptographic signatures that allows for efficient threshold verification and compact representation without sharing private keys, and how all this applies to cryptocurrencies.

Distributed Consensus

• Gosig: Scalable Byzantine Consensus on Adversarial Wide Area Network for Blockchains
  A practical Byzantine fault tolerant consensus algorithm with a multi-round voting protocol and gossip based message propagation scheme.
• Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget
  An algorithm designed at the Ethereum Foundation for a proof of stake blockchain network to safely and securely come to consensus about which blocks are finalized after another mechanism proposes candidate blocks.