Q1 Contributor Showcase: Ben Luelo of Union Labs

Introduction

Last month we announced the Contributor Showcase initiative, designed to recognize outstanding developer community contributions to the IBC Protocol.

The nomination phase for the 2024 Q1 contributor showcase ran from 18-29 March, and from the nominations we received, we are excited to announce Ben Luelo from Union Labs as the winner! Ben is a Founding Engineer at Union working on their relayer implementation.

Ben’s contributions

Ben was selected for opening issue #5084 on the ibc-go repo, shedding light on the pain points faced by light client developers using the ICS-08 Wasm client module, and proposing definitive solutions.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Ben this week to discuss his background, his role at Union, and his contributions to the IBC Protocol, specifically the above-mentioned issue wherein he highlights the root problem of 08-Wasm not acting as a direct data transfer layer between ibc-go and Wasm smart contracts, resulting in extra complexity for relaying and verification.

Given his expertise on IBC relayers, Ben pointed out that due to the opaque nature in which light clients are wrapped within the Wasm client module, it was not possible to know the ClientType to which a message had to be routed, as it is not part of the 08-wasm interface.

To address these issues, Ben's proposal aims to transform the Wasm client module into a more transparent VM that simply sends and receives bytes. This change would enable relayers to interact with the Wasm interface without needing to know the ClientType involved. His recommendations include:

1. Abstracting the 02-client interface to define which ClientType corresponds to a particular code hash.
2. Removing the Any protobuf wrapper used within the Wasm client module, as parsing protobufs and strings are extremely expensive within resource-constrained environments like the EVM.

Implementing Ben’s suggestions would allow the 02-client router to become a fully generalised module that efficiently routes client messages, leaving the verification and business logic to the respective client types.

Ben’s initiative has been instrumental in shedding light on problems faced by light client developers using the Wasm client module, and at Interchain GmbH, we are actively working on implementing these improvements. We are thankful for the time and effort Ben took to highlight some of these issues.

Looking ahead, we are eager to see more contributions from the IBC developer community and are excited to announce the next Contributor Showcase for Q2 2024. Nominations for Q2 are now open.