Protocol Flow

This document details the operational flow of the TACo protocol - how information and operations move through the system. For an overview of the actors involved and their roles, see the UML Use Case Diagram.

The TACo protocol operations follow several distinct but interconnected flows:

Cohort Formation

  • Adopting developers (cohortAuthority) initiate and manage a one-time cohort formation network setup

  • The initialization produces a logical group of nodes with each node maintaining its own private material

  • The cohortAuthority manages parameters for the cohort

  • A minimum of one honest party is required during cohort formation to ensure that private material is not spoofed

Condition Configuration

  • Programmable conditions define who can execute a successful TACo operation (decryption/signing). Conditions are either associated with encrypted payloads (encryption) or configured for a signing cohort.

TACo Services

  • Nodes independently verify that the consumer satisfy the requisite conditions before servicing any request

  • For each node that validates the conditions, a response fragment is provided to the consumer

  • Once a threshold of nodes have provided their fragments, the consumer can locally combine these fragments to complete the operation

Cohort Management

  • Node participation is secured through economic staking in the TACo Nodes Network

  • Cohorts can rotate members according to predefined rules set by the cohortAuthority

  • The rotation rules can be tailored to balance security, availability, and decentralization needs

For a more detailed explanation of the protocol operations, see How TACo Works.

Integration Points

The protocol flow integrates with various TACo components:

  • User applications interact with the TACo protocol through the Client SDK (taco-web)

  • Programmable Conditions enables the definition and validation of conditional execution of operations

  • TACo Nodes Network provides the economic staking mechanism for node operators

  • Coordinator contracts manage cohort formation on-chain

For details on how these components relate to each other architecturally, see Protocol Architecture.

For conceptual explanations of the protocol's design principles, see How TACo Works.

PreviousProtocol ArchitectureNextUML Use Case Diagram

Last updated