Introduction:
We are thrilled to see this concept being introduced to the public. These solutions have been under development in the Cosmos ecosystem for quite some time, long before the introduction of EigenLayer’s intersubjective slashing. While some may view Eigen as an innovator in this area, it’s important to remember that Cosmos has had this capability since its inception. Thanks to the SDK’s governance module, which can execute actions based on vote tallies, Cosmos has always had the ability to slash participants based on subjective criteria. However, the Eigen paper presents interesting mathematical approaches to resolving this problem with efficiency, which could be valuable to draw from.
We look forward to participating in this debate and the next step of the CHIP process, which will be the “signaling phase,” expected to follow this early community feedback gathering.
Feedback & Suggestions:
Regarding feedback, at Govmos, we recommend drawing inspiration from the Eigen math presented in their whitepaper. Specifically, we suggest leveraging the newly accepted permissionless CosmWasm integration on the Hub to create logic similar to Eigen’s. This would involve creating mirrored versions of committed ATOMs in a separate smart-contract based consensus bucket, accessible only to interested parties in each local “subjective consensus.” Each consumer candidate would have its own declared sub-group with a unique identified tied to its consumer ID. The participating validator set for that consumer ID could be accessed directly from the gaia keeper, and once subjective misbehavior is submitted to this consensus, a local fork of this particular sub-group would be initiated. The resolution would follow steps and mathematical processes similar to Eigen’s, isolating the resolution process and preventing the bloating of the general governance system. Only involved parties would participate in the conflict resolution, and in cases where local governance is compromised, the issue could be escalated to general governance.
Furthermore, we suggest evolution in future version should consider extending this feature to the wider Interchain ecosystem beyond consumers. By using IBC as a mediator for messages, any connected chain could utilize this complex fault resolution system, using ATOMs as collateral. These chains would remain sovereign for classical faults and execution slashing via their own consensus but would rely on the Hub to resolve these more complex “intersubjective” issues. They would “rent” the associated collateral security, creating their own “sub-set” within our system. This sub-set would fork and request resolution upon any subjective slashing submission.
Conclusion:
As @jtremback rightly explained, this system would not cause any forks in ATOM. Instead, it would create bonded representations of ATOMs in a dedicated smart contract, which would handle the subjective slashing resolution. This process involves the losing parties transferring their staked value to the winning parties after conflict resolution. The actual mechanism is, of course, more complex, and we recommend reading the whitepaper for a full description of the process, as it involves multiple variables to balance proper incentives to resolve quickly and efficiently.
Thanks for reading,
Govmos.
