General Protocols Assessment on Frontrunner BCH CHIP Proposals, August 2024
As of August 19th, 2024, we at General Protocols would like to cautiously announce our support for CHIP-2021-05-vm-limits as of commit f59a7068b5538ec0b6baaf7302476c3b871da869 for November 2024 lock-in and May 2025 activation on BCH mainchain. This support is contingent on timely delivery of follow-up testing, some of which are already well underway, and aggressive social outreach efforts to actors in the BCH ecosystem.
We are also aware that a separate proposal, CHIP-2024-07-BigInt has been recently proposed as a complementary companion to the VM-Limits CHIP. We are a lot more reserved about this part given the timing of its announcement, the scarcity of accompanying work done, both technical and social, and the potential for a wide impact that would take time to assess. As a potential beneficiary of this proposal, we are not outright opposed to its implementation for this cycle. However, we would urge all actors across the BCH ecosystem to exercise extreme caution, and hold back support and assumptions about its activation for 2025 given its current state.
Support for VM-limits CHIP
General Protocols is a company that prides itself on building robust smart contracts and tools tailor-made for BCH, and the expanded contract space in the VM-Limits CHIP would allow us to do a much wider set of things with shorter development cycle. For example, Anyhedge contracts could be made with more custom constraints, and compound contracts involving more than one oracle may become possible.
We find the constraints placed on CPU-intensive opcodes reasonable from a high level. This is, of course, still contingent on more detailed benchmarks to be published, as some of the restraints have been inserted only recently.
While later than some historical CHIPs, the implementation is also progressing at a satisfactory pace at the time of publishing. We would certainly love for other node teams to join and pick the code apart in the weeks to come to increase confidence.
The lagging part of this CHIP so far is definitely the social part - much work still needs to be done in publicizing this proposal to a wider audience outside of the very most active developers and community members, not to mention forging consensus among actors through collecting explicit support. GP looks forward to helping with this important effort. If this CHIP is important to you, you should also get involved with review, feedback, and helping to bring important stakeholders into the process.
Caution for the BigInts CHIP
We do not have a lot to comment on the BigInt CHIP other than its incomplete state. We do support this from a high level: Increasing integer precision safely on BCH has been done before, and further increases would bring simplicity and robustness for many smart contract users on BCH including ourselves. It has, however, not made satisfying progress given we are less than three months from lock-in, and we find it difficult to recommend its inclusion given our historical emphasis on confidence-building for the network above all other things. It is still possible that developments above our expectations may happen in the coming weeks, but we would like to withhold our support for now.
