Orbital Trusted Party - Matej yangwao
EthereumZuri.ch 2025 · 31 Jan 2025 · 16:30
Matej yangwao presents the orbital trusted party, a network of satellites that run consensus and smart contracts in space. He argues that falling launch costs make orbital computing practical and harder to tamper with, and describes a two-tier design with a slower, high-security layer on the satellites and a terrestrial layer for scalability, built on the Iridium network and earlier CryptoSat satellites. He also covers plans to supply verifiable randomness to onchain applications.
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From EthereumZuri.ch 2025, hosted by EthereumZuri.ch.
Transcript
[Music] okay so welcome here yeah uh welcome on my uh talk about the space coin so today I will tell you something more about the the orbital trusted party and also known as the space computer and what we are trying to achieve as the the lounge cost of the satellites actually steady decreasing in the space industry and why actually is quite opportunity for now so this is actually briefly the the agenda so we'll be speaking about the why is actually the the orbital data centers are right now the opportunity why is actually we see like that's why
is the energy prices decreasing up there and then actually I tell you like how we actually looking forward our the two-tier architecture the fast finality the network resilience the consensus and all the security services we try to provide in the future so this is like the the opportunity you can see so why is actually really interesting you can see on the chart on the right is that actually the amount of the objects like the satellites are being the launched these days are really much higher than uh in last two years than for like between the 1957 and 2010 so actually it's like really steady increasing thanks to the the spasic program uh other Chinese program and the Indian program and the reusable stages and
there is like much more companies working on this so we see the price uh is coming down from the 15,000 per kilog around from 2,000 to resent it to 10,000 in 2019 to approximately around 5,000 per kilogram and with the potential decrease up to $10 so what we actually gain for that is that uh you will have like reduce the cooling cost you have like the access to the solar power so actually the price per kilowatt hour will go low as uh 6 thousands of cents and then actually you save on the water cooling and the potentially can have like the lower latency between certain applications because you have like direct visibility between the data
centers so briefly like what is the space coin so you can see on the graph does it have the laser thank you does it a poter this one yeah okay so so this is briefly like this is actually on the earth is actually where we are right now this is actually technically our satellites and there's actually other the the providers and the the consumers of our servic where actually we are looking forward that the on each the the provider actually can run the satellite service provider and we can technically create the the payments between the the machine economy will be up there because there were probably most likely less humans involved as we know it down on the terrestrial applications and there will be like the communication uh between
them and the bridging the various operations between them so you can think about it as the L1 in the space with the currently soft finality that would be like the network of the t's and you can uh think about it as the marketplace and the payment layer for the other satellite uh service providers so this is briefly like how we see it like we'll be providing the security between the the a users so you have like the your dis or The Styling uh whatever you like the terminals for the users will be technically like the RPC nodes and they will be communicating with the satellit so this could be like the Amazon WS the ground station Services various the Hobbies ground stations and whatsoever you can be uh beam any error signal later on the
optical terminal and then actually you can execute things on the smart contract on the satellites and then actually you can get the access to the network of course eventually it will be much more cheaper but now actually the entry is bit expensive so what's our track record for now is that we launched the crypto 3 with the Iridium connection I will explain the later what's the idium uh then we launched the end of the last year we launched the uh Satellites with the R next modem which actually provides much more bandwidth between the satellites and we did it with the opose orbital xhel cryptos set so maybe some ogs actually know the Crypt set projects and now actually we are looking forward to prepare the fleet of the satellites
which actually will be eventually communicate between each other and with all of these we be like immute to the traditional side channels and the administ tampering you have like down on the earth here so this is briefly like the top down infrastructure how we look like so you can see like the the Iridium network is this so iridium is now consisting around 60 Satellites with nine in the the backup some of them actually in redit tany sitting on the earth ready to Lounge imminent uh it's like the really old network uh from late of the 19s which we been gradually bootstrap it for the military purposes it's mostly for the coordinating uh very mil military equipment on the ground but now it's actually opening more for the retail and other space applications
because their availability from the geostationary orbit means like the it have like the oversight of all the planet and maybe you heard about it there is like the Garmin have this communicator and you can messaging so a lot of people who are doing the extreme sports maybe heard about it is like this helicopter phone it's reachable really everywhere now is actually Starling doing the direct to cell so they're similar and much cheaper and then another layer is like the with the the crypto set formerly known as crypto set now is actually known the upos orbital and then actually we're building the the layer we call like the space coin and then we try to leverage all of this the properties so irid unit work the computation from the crypto set and then actually will be gradually resistant for these various DS attacks and the sensorship probably on the earth and we
have like the multiple communication paths between the earth once we getting more satellites and later on more uh communication providers so iridum is like just our first but we believe there will be like more Optical terminals in the future available on the market to use uh so I will briefly walk you through our two-tier architecture so how we think about it is like that we have layer one so is the celestial orbit security so we're actually doing like the most valuable transactions which will be eventually slow for now and then Layer Two which actually we call it like un Celestial on the earth for scalability and it's kind of the Noel approach which where we combining the these benefits of the rollups and we can like secure these transactions so here
you can see like the brief uh uh the schematics like how the request goes so the request goes to the leaders so we will be like the first satellites which will be in the visibility window that actually will be the proposing the the consensus validations then these satellites uh will align on the voting and eventually then the confirmation will be beam down back to the Earth where actually we come back and uh do the final handshakes so this is actually we call like the Streamline the consensus and this actually also it's a co uh term to the Philip here in the first throw the elastic leader selection based on the satellite reachability so this is briefly like how it uh works like
leveraging the pbft based the the consensus with the instant finality so this is actually where the satellites are in the reachability in any moment so usually there is like either one zero or two right and Depends also on the reachability that claims also the bandwidth and messages we can pass through so this is because we actually in really constraint environment in the space we are talking about uh 500 kilometers in the altitude sometimes we be even more like 700 and uh currently with current consensus we require only connectivity with one node as the leader so this picture is more complicated so here you can see the graph how it goes in the steps so first from ground
stations they'll propose on the first satellites which is in the the reachability then actually the will uh again starts the voting and the voting actually is coming back on the the ground station where actually the there's another step like this request coming back down and the voting between the satellites and coming back to the the ground station where's the the other visibility of the satellites are so this is briefly how things are currently working on our based on our blue paper so we'll be more refin this in our future white paper which is coming like this year soon and then you can have like more questions eventually so and next stuff this is like on the schematics so how the UN celestial Layer Two with the fast pre-confirmation works
so this is the one how we call the fastest puff so this is actually the for instant interactions between the users and the L2 this is mostly for the transactions which have the lower value so and required the quick settlements but actually no Celestial L1 is actually involved in this setting so you can understand it like you submit like on any LD like these days and nothing much to do with the L1 because that's doesn't uh touch at all but where in this uh the second like uh with the pre finality with the backup we'll be offsetting uh the attestations if I'm right that to the medium security path we called with the froud proof uh windows that where
actually the confirmed transactions on the L2 will get the the validator attestations and they they will be like the the state will be updated uh the states will be updated to the celestial L1 as the backup and that actually will allows more time for the the front uh challenges and uh this something like the middle ground where actually we balance the speed and security and the last one the scenario is actually where we have the the full finality with the fast pre confirmations which is like for the highest security path you can think about like probably the Bitcoin is like closest to one is where actually the things will complete the L1 the verification transactions and it flows through the the UN Celestial L2
to the the celestial one but uh downsize of this one is actually it requires the full consensus so it will also take time but the state will be fully committed to Celestial L1 so it will be like the longest block time in this uh case which eventually once we get more band withd more satellit will eventually uh decrease but this is actually more intentionally for the the for high value transactions so what we can actually do with this is we can provide some uh security services so most basic one is the the functioning as the security C processor we can enable uh potential as well so you can think about it as we have the space compute in the orbit with
the physical isolation we can also provide the secer custodian so you can understand that is like the key management so you can store your keys with uh our uh Cube sets and it will be in fully permissionless mode then we can provide the cosmic entropy as we have the exposure for the sun radiation we can provide the highest grade of the entropy for the application down here on the earth until you trust the the cloud Fair lavel lamps and then actually we came up with another use case like the secure deletion with the physical guarantees so if we have like technically some Eternal bulleting board we can uh prove that it's it's deleted and nobody will touch it or try to recover it from the hardware because the cube itself actually is flying 7 km/
second and that's like the E eal bulletin board capabilities so this is actually for the smart Contra capabilities if some people asking so current plan is like the support evm compatibility then actually will be like the having the initial deployment focusing on the bridge contracts and the future will be like uh extensibility through the risk uh weend based uh VMS as well so and the current goto Market we are thinking about is like the we are looking actively for L2 Partnerships so if you are building L2 feel free to reach out ping me or anybody from the team the use case is like the checkpointing is like good for the the preventing long range attacks which is like pretty new I would like to say from
2022 then we'll be like offering the true random generator and the pre-confirmation for the soft finality with our L1 then there is like potential for the multi-prover scenario L2 SC scalability for the usability for space coin is the the D layer and obviously the biggest uh mching to machine the satell Eon satellite economy which actually happen on the orbit and the C lunar on the moon so if some people are asking about the costs the current Lounge costs are somewhere around 5,000 per kilogram with the prospect to decrease like to $30 per kilogram in less than decade so I think it will happening soonly we'll see like how the Starship the Chopsticks will project like probably the new prices for the new
slots launching uh satellites in the future and for satellites per computation it also depends on the configuration so you can think about it cheapest option we currently have with prospected partner is like the ATK where we actually using on the part of the other satellite where being as the free flyer could go up to to three millions per satellite but it actually can provide much more than you have like currently available under your fingerprints in your notebook and the current maintain costs are approximately around 200k yearly it's mostly involving the managing the communications the subscription for the communications and uh all the personal involved and this is briefly like our approximate road map so
we hope that during the E Denver we can demo some things already and we'll be releasing the white paper as well and we'll be releasing the flashh out specs for the L1 and eventually integrating the first L1 with the l2s so that will happen this year for sure and I think uh we are actively looking for the L1 and L2 foundation so if you know any of your friends would like to have like a much higher security grade we are open to any kind of the handshake we are actively looking for the wallets so we in chat with the safe fire blocks and similar companies so we can like integrate uh the user assets being stored with us we
are actively looking for The validators Who can run the satellites for the network as well we can guide them through and the entropy providers who can like the providing entropy or want to get uh entropy from us so please let's get in touch and yeah feel free to scan the codes so this is the space coin the the Twitter the first one there is the Phillips he's sitting over there in the blue sweer this is the Daniel he's in Australia currently and yeah this is me feel free to reach out uh connect and if you have any curious questions feel free to ask thank you wow Amazing Project actually a lot of things happening ahead of you guys
amazing road map uh I'm sure it spark a lot of questions so now is the time if someone want to do some question to mat feel free to ask any questions yeah currently we plan to like have like around 20 satellites that's like frequent we have also FAQ on the website so we handl the questions but happy to answer now you anything you can shoot anything you're curious about the space compute and uh I do have one if you want yeah go actually um so what how are you going to demonstrate in ethereum Denver like the first idea because at least for me that was a really disruptive um project so so
so how it's going to look like this what can we expect uh well I think we would like to demonstrate the the entropy from the the cube sets which will be like uh sort of verifiable and uh we'll be working with the the partners which are actually available on the markets so they can technically use S entropy for their uh the things like the you have like the lotto if you know the pgf so we can probably work with them and the other similar foundations we actually providing the whereas actually the brf and vdf is actually important for them so that's actually one of this [Music]