Gossamer team progress update 01.09.2025

[P1sar]

August Update

Cargo size

During last month we were focused on updating non-direct dependencies to use new version of curve25519-dalek with PR that eventually get closed in favor of completely removing smoldot and smoldot-light dependencies from polkadot-sdk in this PR that also fixed issue of existing experimental flag

WebRTC

Working on PoC implementation to establish transport between libp2p-webrtc and litep2p, thise expeirments were done here and here.
General idea behind this is to extend existing litep2p-perf library to include WebRTC connection between litep2p and libp2p-like implementaion that is used in smoldot.
This should provide the foundation and development platform to help us test future changes to the litep2p WebRTC implementation given we have a test harness now to test multistream capability and backpressure.
The ongoing work can be tracked in this PR.
Given that litep2p has not implemented the client side of WebRTC, we are trying to provide a client that the litep2p server can interact with by implementing a client that utilizes:

• Smoldot like WebRTC client compiled to WASM utilizing the browser JS APIs to establish RTC connections. Freddy has already made good progress extracting the code from Smoldot that initializes the WebRTC connection.
• Native WebRTC client utilizing rust-libp2p.

Additioanly resolved a small dependencie issue

Speculative availability

PullRequest is in active review phase.

Next steps:

• Working on new Zombinet tests to cover new behaviour
• Benchmarking
• Preparing metering to test new behaviour on our private testnet
• Working on testing plan

Possible problems:
Implementation was an 'easy' part, now, before soultion will be adopted on public testnets and then on mainnets we need to privatly test and meter the soltuion.

Approval rewards:

We have a fist Pull Request with PoC implementation of the Approval rewards off-chain flow:

• Implemented approval usage collection per session and prepared the initial version of ApprovalTally computation.
• ApprovalsTally distribution
• Subjective Median calcualtion, signing and distribution.

Next steps: finalize off-chain consensus, integrate metering and observability, and begin testing on the testnet.

Possible problems: Currently we are piggybacking on existing approvals gossip engine to distribute ApprovalsTally and Medians, this might influence performance and require additional attention duringmeteringand probably implementing separate gossip engine

Follow Epic progress

Smart Contracts Infrastructure Integration (Foundry-Polkadot)

In the end of the month we started scoping this work on Foundry-polkadot.
Specifically on its Anvil module

Off-chain runtime

Work onthis feature is postopned until Approval Rewards task is moved to testing phase.

DDoS protection

In our initial research, we identified a key DDoS bottleneck in the current Polkadot validator implementation. While this issue is important, work on addressing it has been postponed in favor of progress on Polkadot-Foundry.