UTXO on Substrate

A UTXO chain implementation on Substrate. This repo is an updated implementation of the original Substrate UXTO by Dmitriy Kashitsyn

For a live demo, check out how to set up this repo with Polkadot UI here.

Project Structure

  • master branch contains the full solution (cheats).
  • workshop branch contains a UTXO boilerplate for the following workshop. The following tutorials will walks you through an implementation of UTXO on Substrate in workshop format. Feel free to host your own workshops in your local communities using this boilerplate!

Workshop

Estimated time: 2 hours

Over this course of this workshop, you will learn:

  • How to implement the UTXO model on Substrate
  • How to secure UTXO transactions against attacks
  • How to seed genesis block with UTXOs
  • How to reward block validators in this environment
  • How to customize transaction pool logic on Substrate
  • Good coding patterns for working with Substrate & Rust

Note: This Master branch contains all the answers. Try not to peek!

1. Install | Upgrade Rust

curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

# On Windows, download and run rustup-init.exe
# from https://rustup.rs instead

rustup update nightly
rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown --toolchain nightly
rustup update stable
cargo install --git https://github.com/alexcrichton/wasm-gc

Clone the workshop boilerplate

git clone https://github.com/nczhu/utxo-workshop.git
git checkout -b workshop

# Double check that it builds correctly
./build.sh
cargo build --release

Challenge 1: UTXO Transaction Security

UTXO validates transactions as follows:

  • Check signatures
  • Check all inputs are unspent
  • Check input == output value
  • Set Input to “spent”

Similarly in our UTXO implementation, we need to prevent malicious users from sending bad transactions. utxo.rs contains some tests that simulate these malicious attacks.

Your challenge is to extend the implementation such that only secure transactions will go through.

Hint: Remember the check-before-state-change pattern!

Directions

Make sure you are on the workshop branch

  1. Run cargo test: cargo test -p utxo-runtime

  2. Notice that 7/8 tests are failing!

failures:
    utxo::tests::attack_by_double_counting_input
    utxo::tests::attack_by_double_generating_output
    utxo::tests::attack_by_over_spending
    utxo::tests::attack_by_overflowing
    utxo::tests::attack_by_permanently_sinking_outputs
    utxo::tests::attack_with_empty_transactions
    utxo::tests::attack_with_invalid_signature
  1. In utxo.rs, extend check_transaction() to make the following tests pass.

Hint: You may want to make them pass in the following order!

[0] test utxo::tests::attack_with_empty_transactions ... ok
[1] test utxo::tests::attack_by_double_counting_input ... ok
[2] test utxo::tests::attack_by_double_generating_output ... ok
[3] test utxo::tests::attack_with_invalid_signature ... ok
[4] test utxo::tests::attack_by_permanently_sinking_outputs ... ok
[5] test utxo::tests::attack_by_overflowing ... ok
[6] test utxo::tests::attack_by_over_spending ... ok

Challenge 2: Transaction Ordering

Scenario: Imagine a situation where Alice pays Bob via transaction A, then Bob uses his new utxo to pay Charlie, via transaction B. In short, B depends on the success of A.

However, depending on network latency, the runtime might deliver transaction B to a node's transaction pool before delivering transaction A!

Your challenge is to overcome this race condition.

A naive solution is to simply drop transaction B. But Substrate lets you implement transaction ordering logic.

In Substrate, you can specify the requirements for dispatching a transaction, e.g. wait for transaction A to arrive before dispatching B.

Directions:

  1. Read about a transaction lifecycle in Substrate

  2. Read about TaggedTransactionQueue and TransactionValidity

  3. Implement the correct transaction ordering logic such that transactions with pending dependencies can wait in the transaction pool until its requirements are satisfied.

Hint: You can filter for specific types of transactions using the following syntax:

if let Some(&utxo::Call::execute(ref transaction)) = IsSubType::<utxo::Module<Runtime>>::is_aux_sub_type(&tx.function) {
    // Your implementation here
}

Challenge 3: Extensions

You can try building the following extensions:

  • Give transactions in the pool a smarter longevity lifetime
  • Implement coinbase transactions, by letting users add value through work

Demo Polkadot UI

# In the Runtime repo
./target/release/utxo-runtime purge-chain -—dev // If you need to purge your db
./target/release/utxo-runtime —-dev
  1. Visit Polkadot JS

  2. Load your type definitions in Settings > Developer

{
  "Value": "u128",
  "LockStatus": "u32",
  "TransactionInput": {
    "parent_output": "Hash",
    "signature": "Signature"
  },
  "TransactionOutput": {
    "value": "Value",
    "pubkey": "Hash",
    "salt": "u64"
  },
  "Transaction": {
    "inputs": "Vec<TransactionInput>",
    "outputs": "Vec<TransactionOutput>"
  }
}
  1. Create an account Alice1 from this seed using sr25519: 0x9d61b19deffd5a60ba844af492ec2cc44449c5697b326919703bac031cae7f60

  2. Check that the genesis block contains 1 pre-configured UTXO for Alice as follows:

TransactionOutput {
  value: Value::max_value(),
  pubkey: H256::from_slice(&ALICE_KEY),
  salt: 0,
}

Hint: UTXO Hash 0xf414d3dfaf46a7f547f8c3572e5831228fe3795a5f26dd10a1f6ae323993b234

  1. Send a new UTXO transaction from Alice as follows:
TransactionOutput {
  value: 100,
  pubkey: H256::from_slice(&ALICE_KEY),
  salt: 2,
}],

Hint: Encoded Transaction 0x04f414d3dfaf46a7f547f8c3572e5831228fe3795a5f26dd10a1f6ae323993b234dc6dda5055768c30c1134dc83ce55b3c463636899a33c9fc62dbac39018b562fa21532b3c487a71dab55036f2e6e0a19ef98b05272c07db6f013c055e3659400046400000000000000000000000000000044a996beb1eef7bdcab976ab6d2ca26104834164ecf28fb375600576fcc6eb0f0200000000000000

  1. Check that the new utxo was generated and the extrinsic succeeded in the block.

Hint: new UTXO hash 0xd25d4a5cade9f8219cfffffd8474d323a5ba0b2deb5db4a490e1d3b9feb79278

Helpful Resources