Files
chains/mpcvm
zeekayandHanzo Dev b9f95308a8 mpcvm: custody answers to the transport, not to the request body
Signing authority was resolved from a name the requester wrote about itself.
CrossChainRequest already receives the sender's chain id from the transport,
which authenticated it, and then passed req.RequestingChain to the permission
lookup instead -- so the proven identity sat unused in the signature while a
field the sender controlled decided what it was allowed to do. The stock table
grants B-Chain sign, keygen and reshare at 100k/day, so the claim was worth
having.

Caller carries an authenticated chain and nothing else can be substituted for
it: the only constructor takes the transport's chain id, the fields are
unexported, and the zero value grants nothing, so a path that forgets to
authenticate fails closed instead of quietly inheriting rights. Making it a type
rather than a convention is what turns "remember not to read the body" into
something the compiler checks -- it listed every call site that had been passing
a claim.

Authorization binds to the chain ID, never to the label. A label is an
operator's convenience and anyone can spell it; the id is the identity consensus
itself uses. An entry with no chainId is bound to no chain and grants nothing,
and Initialize names those entries at boot, because silence there would read as
"custody is configured" right up until the first release failed.

HTTP keygen and sign are gone rather than guarded. That transport authenticates
no chain, so there was no check to write -- a body can say it is the bridge as
easily as it can say anything else. Ceremonies are requested by chains over the
cross-chain path; the HTTP surface reads replicated state, which needs no
identity.

Co-authored-by: Hanzo Dev <[email protected]>
2026-08-20 10:47:08 -07:00
..

mpcvm — M-Chain

M-Chain is the MPC threshold-custody chain. chains/mpcvm is its VM: a plugin-loaded chain.ChainVM with genesis, validators, block production and replicated state.

It exists to hold the keys that custody bridged assets on external chains, and to do that on-chain instead of in an off-chain signer cluster.

  • vmID mpcvm = constants.MPCVMID, CB58 qCURact1n41FcoNBch8iMVBwc9AWie48D118ZNJ5tBdWrvryS. The plugin binary's filename must be that CB58 — that is how the node resolves a CreateChainTx's vmID to an implementation. A vmID is an immutable one-way door once a chain is created with it; TestVMID_IsCanonicalAndStable pins it and lists every declaration that must move together.
  • Genesis chain. M-Chain is in the P-Chain chain set at height 0 on every network (genesis/configs/*/mchain.json), tracked by validators from boot — not created later by a CreateChainTx someone has to remember to submit.
  • Per LP-134 / LP-7050 there is no T-Chain and no teleportvm: teleport IS bridgevm (B-Chain, LP-6000), and the FHE half of the retired ThresholdVM is fhevm (F-Chain, LP-8200). Any identifier still naming "T-Chain" or "ThresholdVM-as-a-chain" is stale.

The quorum, and why it is spelled "3-of-5"

A threshold policy has two numbers that differ by one, and confusing them is the defining failure mode of this domain:

meaning where it appears
K signers required operator language, runbooks, genesis policy
t polynomial degree = K−1 cmp.Keygen, frost.Keygen, stored configs

Passing an operator's 3 where a library wants t builds a 4-of-5 key. Nothing errors; three custodians simply cannot sign, and for a key that already holds funds the only fix is a resharing ceremony with parties that may no longer exist.

So M-Chain never carries a bare threshold number. Genesis states "policy": "3-of-5", it decodes to a quorum.Policy, and the degree is obtained only by calling Policy.Degree(). luxfi/threshold/pkg/quorum is the one place K and t are allowed to meet.

M-Chain additionally requires 2K > N (types.HasUniqueQuorum). CGGMP21 is unforgeable against up to N−1 corruptions, so 2-of-5 is cryptographically sound; but with two disjoint quorums, two halves of the committee could authorise contradictory releases of the same funds.

The policy must also fit the network's validator set — the committee IS the validator set, so N cannot exceed the validators that exist to hold shares. TestMChainPolicyIsSatisfiableByTheGenesisValidatorSet in the node repo enforces it.

What is on-chain and what is not

replicated in the state root contents
c/ consensus yes yes key registry, ceremony log, blocks, height index
n/ node-private no no this validator's secret key shares

The registry holds only public values — policy, participants, group public key, custody address. A share never enters consensus state. State is written the moment each fact becomes true, so a crash cannot lose the record of who holds the funds, and Initialize resumes the accepted tip rather than recomputing genesis.

Blocks are verified, not trusted

  • A sign operation carries the signature; Verify re-checks it against the group public key already in the registry. A proposer cannot fabricate one without forging ECDSA, and a validator that sat out the ceremony still verifies the result.
  • A keygen operation carries a proof of possession by the new group key over its own registration. That rules out registering a key you do not control. The declared degree is bound separately, by participants cross-checking the record against their own share — one honest participant is enough to reject a mis-declared key.
  • Every block carries its post-state root. Verify recomputes it, so two validators that would diverge cannot both accept.

Leaderless and permissionless

Ceremony ids are derived from the task — H(tag ‖ keyID ‖ digest ‖ sorted signers) — so every validator converges on the same ceremony with no announce round and no coordinator. The signing quorum is likewise a pure function of the task, so all nodes agree on which K sign without an election.

The committee is the chain's own validator set. Joining the signing ring is joining the validator set: no allowlist, no operator registry, no admin-gated key ceremony.

Proof

TestBridgeCustody_ThreeOfFive runs five VMs over the real gossip transport: a real CGGMP21 DKG at degree 2, exactly three of five sign, two decline, the signature verifies under the group key, and a block carrying it is verified and accepted by all five — including the two that never touched the ceremony — with every node ending on the same state root.

Layout

path role
vm.go chain.ChainVM: Initialize/resume, BuildBlock, custody API
custody.go ceremony lifecycle — DKG, signing, quorum selection, staging
state.go persisted state: registry, ceremony log, roots, share store
block.go the verified state transition
wire.go native-ZAP struct-is-wire encodings
transport.go gossip router (production) + in-process mesh (tests)
executor.go drives luxfi/threshold protocol handlers
types/ shared ceremony state machine and the 2K > N custody floor
fhe/ TFHE helpers retained for the F-Chain handoff