I am delighted to see the recent news coverage about the Ouroboros paper being accepted to Crypto 17, the most prestigious cryptography event of the year. No other blockchain protocol, apart from Bitcoin, has achieved this level of academic peer review. This is recognition from the academic community that this paper is a serious contribution to cryptography, in being the first Proof-of-Stake protocol to be provably secure. In computer science, what matters in terms of gaining a stamp of approval for new research is not being published in journals, as is the case in many other fields. Instead, what is most important is having the paper accepted by conferences to be scrutinised by fellow academics. This is why we are very proud that our researchers’ work has been admitted to Crypto 17.

The conference takes place in California during August and topics covered include all aspects of cryptography, not only Bitcoin and blockchain.

Developing a secure Proof-of-Stake protocol is one of the big problems to solved in cryptography. It is the key to blockchains being scaled up to handle many more users than it can at the moment. You only have to look at the hurdles that Proof-of-Work based Bitcoin is facing, as it undergoes a struggle to upgrade its technology, to see why Proof of Stake is important.

Proof-of-Stake protocols have the advantage of avoiding the huge computer processing resources demanded by Proof-of-Work systems – one study showed that the energy required to run Bitcoin’s blockchain was equivalent to the power consumed by a small country.

It is highly unusual for a new protocol to progress this quickly from research to implementation, with publications usually taking years to mature for real-world use. Our researchers know of no other cryptography paper that has progressed through peer review this fast. Ouroboros is already being applied to industry use – it is going into Cardano, a blockchain platform being developed by IOHK.

Professor Aggelos Kiayias, who led the research, says: "Building a secure Proof-of- Stake blockchain is an important open problem and I am very happy that we will share our progress towards its resolution with fellow cryptographers at Crypto this year. In Ouroboros, we flesh out for the first time the combinatorial nature of proving the security of Proof of Stake blockchain protocols and I anticipate that our methodology will be valuable widely to blockchain researchers.

"By developing a provably secure Proof-of- Stake protocol, we can now confidently build a blockchain that can handle many more users, resolving many of the scalability and performance issues faced by proof-of- work based protocols like Bitcoin. We have already implemented Ouroboros and tested it with a cloud deployment with very good results."


"With Ouroboros, as well as the upcoming version of our protocol ‘Ouroboros Praos’ that will be released soon, IOHK is at the forefront of efficient and secure blockchain research and development," Prof Kiayias adds.

Crypto 17 is the 37th International Cryptology Conference. It will be held from August 20 to 24 this year, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR).

Further information on the Ouroboros paper is also available in a series of videos.

It took a little longer than expected but I finally made the trip to Buenos Aires, Argentina. In fact, I'm standing at a work desk by the window in Frankfurt airport waiting for my flight back to Dublin. I'm enjoying a gloriously sunny day here through the wall of glass. 

It was another productive trip, a lot has happened since the Team Grothendieck trips to Poland and St Petersburg. In our work to build a Scala client for Ethereum Classic there has been a lot of code written, a lot of understanding gained, and a couple of milestones reached: we now have the ability to download and execute blocks of transactions from the ETC chain. We have also evolved a lot as a team.

The remaining milestones to reach include mining, and the JSON API – to allow Mist and other dapp wallets to use our client. In parallel with that we need to focus on our codebase. It was this process that the Grothendieck team’s Alan Verbner and Nico Tallar, and I spent our time on in BA. 

As a background, in an ideal world we would create code from day one supporting the coupling that made sense as we approached the release. However, this is an almost impossible task because we can't usually know the most sensible "final" coupling when starting out. For the ETC client we took the (oft used) approach that we would write clean unit tested code that implemented the functionality we understood at the time and then refactor as we learnt more. For example, when we finished the block download phase we had very little in the way of model classes for ‘blockchain’. However, as we spun up the "Tx Execution" phase, we discovered it made a lot of sense to create a set of functions coalescing around a ‘blockchain’ model. 

There's a school of thought that says this is the way to carry on: don't waste your time building "reusable" components that aren't reusable and won't be reused. I have sympathy for this approach because building reusable components is hard and it is embarrassing for your new component – the one you spent time and effort on – to fail at the first attempt at reuse because it doesn't quite do what you need it to. Better to allow the new functionality to drive refactors as and when it comes. There's a humility to this approach that appeals to me. 

Guess what's coming next? We're going to look at ways to modularise our client. Why? Firstly and most importantly it's a functional requirement for the codebase to support a significant level of flexibility. Four things that might define the core of a blockchain client are the network module, the ledger, the consensus mechanism and the wallet. Closely coupling the wallet and ledger together, we would like to experiment with different types of ledger and different types of consensus. And these should be able to use a well defined network module.  

So we will first attempt to isolate the 'network' module. This is a module that maintains connections to peers and sends and receives a configurable set of messages. It allows messages to be addressed to a peer or broadcast to many peers. It allows clients of the module to register for types of messages and types of message per peer. It's also functionality that we have already created. We just need to organize it so that it's reusable!

Why now? The JSON RPC API – in theory – should be controller layer code. The mining integration should – also in theory – not affect the workings of the network module. So the functionality to be reused should already exist and when we repackage it without breaking the existing system we know it's useful. By the time we get around to examining the coupling of the ledger and consensus the same should be true, we won't be making up use cases for invented modules, we will have specific working code to repackage. Will we produce interfaces and coupling that can be reused? That's the challenge. And after that – optimization of the internals...

Mining, web API and modularisation are not trivial tasks but they will end. And with them we reach the end of the existing roadmap – stability, bug fixes and auditing aside. For the past five months we have been playing catch up, we didn't need to talk about future evolution of the technology because we had a clear and challenging mandate – to recreate a client from the ground up. Now that we're relatively close to doing that, the exciting process of talking about the future of the codebase can begin. 

While in BA, Sergio Lerner kindly hosted the three of us at his office and over decent coffee and alfojores we had a good discussion about Ethereum tech, and some of the things he's been up to. And of course, RSK's upcoming release of their platform at Consensus 2017 in NYC. (Best of luck RSK!)

I'm always interested in how a global blockchain aimed at general purpose use can scale, with no way to delete defunct contracts from the global state trie. Sergio made the interesting point that ETC probably won't need to scale for a couple of years. He also suggested that with storage being so cheap for a network in a steady state (with most nodes staying up to date) it would be more expensive for all nodes to delete a contract than to keep it.

Apart from Rootstock, the Bitcoin Embassy in Buenos Aires, where Alan and Nico normally work is littered with interesting people working on multiple ways of leveraging the Bitcoin blockchain. There's a great atmosphere in the building, calm and friendly but industrious and I really enjoyed my time there, so when it was suggested we attend a live podcast…we said yes!

A special shout out to Alan Verbner, a man who is proud of his city and I think the city can be proud of him. We walked the city the whole weekend and I got a real sense of it. BA is modern but you don't have to look too hard to find old world charm – French restaurants with dark wood and marble counters, majestic old cafes full of Art Deco gold fittings and the smell of cardamon infused coffee. And then there's the steak. Vegetarians, look away now. I'm delighted to report that Argentina’s reputation for steak is well deserved. The variety of cuts, the sauces, the cooking...it might be worth going back just to eat steak. 

Last Monday should have been particularly jarring given the recent excitement. However, it was anything but. Sunlight was flooding the back garden and all the small birds of the neighborhood came together to perform an impromptu concert at maximum volume. I could hear them clearly through the double glazing. Spring had sprung in Dublin. And I’d just come back from Malta talking Ethereum, Cardano, blockchain, crypto, functional languages, goal management and a ton of other cool stuff. Life is good.

It was my first time attending the Financial Cryptography and Data Security conference. The conference is a week-long annual event for cryptography as applied to finance. This year, IOHK's chief scientist Aggelos Kiayias put a great programme of speakers together. Instantly recognizable figures from the crypto community attended – Adam Back, Emin Gün Sirer, Vitalik Buterin and many more. IOHK researchers attended and it was great to see people who may only know each other through twitter feeds and published papers get to speak to each other.

I hope and presume this conference has generated many fine and detailed articles on Coindesk and beyond. This won't be one of them. Particular highlights for me were listening to MIT professor and cryptography pioneer Silvio Micali speak about the Algorand protocol and the conscious decision to keep incentives out of the equation. That instantly generated a little controversy and is going to need a long second look. 

Dmitry Meshkov, IOHK researcher, presented Improving Authenticated Dynamic Dictionaries, with Applications to Cryptocurrencies which is of particular interest to Team Grothendieck as we have wrestled with our implementation of the "Modified Merkle Patricia Trie" as specified in the original yellow paper. In all its forms it’s a clever idea – being able to move forward and back through the state by memorizing a root hash and being able to show tries are equivalent based on the equivalence of their root hashes. Dmitry et al have a scala implementation, and if I heard Vitalik Buterin correctly (he commented after the presentation) he suggested there might be room for improvement on the original implementation, so there are possibilities for enhancements there.

The conference was good, but it had some stiff competition from all the fun I had and everything I learned from mixing with other IOHK employees. IOHK employees usually work remotely but for more than a week almost 40 people gathered in Malta, who had traveled from far flung places like Osaka, St. Petersburg and California, including IOHK founders Jeremy Wood and Charles Hoskinson. While that week was mostly about the conference it was also an opportunity to get some work done. On the top floor of some very nice rented office space, the Serokell and Daedalus teams along with other key personnel on the Cardano project hammered out plans and approaches to give said project a major push forward. There was time for some introspection too and a lot of productive meetings around development methodology.  

A real highlight of working for this company is tripping across experts in many technical fields – functional languages, formal verification, full-time life time cryptographers, language designers and creators, high energy physicists... High energy physicists. Who tell jokes. 

And it gets better. The previous week, the week of the 27th of March, Team Grothendieck arrived in Athens to work on our next and arguably most important milestone – "Transaction Execution" or "tx execution" for short. This was the first time the whole team came together to work, physically together and in same time zone. 

The team reached its first milestone on Friday 24th March. That milestone involved downloading all blocks to the local machine and providing those blocks to other clients, further dispersing the transactions across the peer-to-peer network. The client also supports "fast download", which is the process of downloading the state trie from a point in recent history in order to shorten the time required for a client to get fully up to date with the blockchain. The premise being that downloading the state trie is faster than executing every transaction since block 0. As our first milestone it was very exciting to reach, but also to see the blocks and transactions flying around the network and know that we can successfully synchronize our local database with the rest of the Ethereum Classic network. 

We had a productive few days at the university of Athens, the area is quiet, cool in the shade and conducive to working. The sun shone, the wind blew and the coffee was good. Our hotel was close to the university so we got to walk the streets of Athens in the mornings and see a little of daily life in the city. The subject of our days in Athens (transaction execution) is the process of updating the ledger by applying valid transactions to it block by block. After each block of transactions has been applied to the ledger the ledger exhibits a new state. This state is stored in the form of a state trie and the root of this trie is a hash reflecting precisely the contents of the state trie. The questions we had to answer were – did we understand the goal; did we understand how we measure success; did we have the functionality covered by existing tasks; how long would it take and finally some knowledge swapping as working apart inevitably means small knowledge silos had begun to develop despite our efforts. By Thursday evening we had satisfactorily answered all these questions and we expect to reach the tx execution milestone by the end of April. 

On the Friday the team attended the Smart Contracts conference and spoke with Charles Hoskinson, Prof Aggelos Kiayias, Darryl McAdams and others about the future of smart contracts and the law.

There was tentative agreement on the eventuality of smart contract template libraries, so if for example the author wanted to provide an upgrade path for the contract in the event of some issue being found (ahem!) or have some means of dissolving/locking the contract if the participants lose faith, a tried and trusted set of templates would exist for the contract author to mix and match. Templates of this type could claim regulatory compliance out of the box, which is a great (if not new) way to leverage the usefulness of software in the world of contract law – solve a problem once and reuse the solution ad nauseam. I suspect this is an area most smart contract developers currently enjoy ignoring! 

A final word on Athens, the Acropolis museum  is a wonderful building and worth a visit even if they housed nothing there, but coupled with the treasures of the ancient world and a good restaurant it's a must-see if you find yourself in the area.

Here's hoping the end of April sees us reach another exciting milestone, an even bigger one this time, and we are able to execute every transaction in the blockchain using the Grothendieck client. That would really give the birds something to sing about... 

Experts in law and cryptography are speaking today at a smart contracts day in Athens, organised by IOHK chief scientist Aggelos Kiayias, chair of cyber security and privacy at the University of Edinburgh as well as director of its Blockchain Technology Laboratory. Smart contracts are an emerging technology that run on the same infrastructure that supports Bitcoin: a blockchain. They are digital legal contracts between parties that rely not on the traditional rule of law and institutions such as legal offices and courts, but on cryptography. Professor Aggelos Kiayias says: "To understand the technology it is useful to contrast cryptography and law. Law regulates interactions between persons ensuring fairness and basic rights. In this way, law offers protection from other persons with conflicting interests by relying on rule of law and social institutions. On the other hand, cryptography is the science of redistributing trust in any system that emerges from the interaction of multiple persons. It also protects people from other persons with conflicting interests but its protection is achieved by relying on hard mathematical problems."

So how do smart contracts work? Prof Kiayias again: "A smart contract is a piece of code written in a formal language that records all terms for a certain engagement. It has the power to self execute when certain conditions are triggered and can enforce its outcomes in a cryptographic sense. There is a multitude of smart contract applications in areas such as intellectual property, financial instruments, rental and leasing agreements and others."

Also speaking at the conference are Charles Hoskinson, IOHK CEO and Co-Founder; Burkard Schafer, Professor of Computational Legal Theory and director of the SCRIPT Centre for IT and IP law at the University of Edinburgh; Peter Van Valkenburgh, Director of Research at Coin Center; and Christoph Sorge, holder of the juris professorship of legal informatics, co-director of the Institute for Law and Informatics, and member of the Center for IT Security, Privacy and Accountability at Saarland University.

Darryl McAdams, IOHK's Team Plutus manager is working on a new programming language for smart contracts (Plutus) and is in Athens for the conference. According to Darryl, "A smart contract is a program which can implement an agreement of one form or another between multiple parties. They can be simple transfers of money, contracts in the traditional sense involving rights and obligations of various parties, or things more complex such as a game of chess, a distributed library, or a decentralized DNS system. In all of these cases, the purpose and behaviour of the system needs to be well understood, and in many cases, such as financial contracts with large sums of money involved, the correctness of the program is absolutely vital. In my talk, I will discuss the design of the Plutus language, a new programming language for authoring smart contracts, and demonstrate its use. I'll also discuss the motivation behind its design, especially with a view towards correct implementation of a contract's purpose and behaviour."

The event – "Smart Contracts Day, Cryptography & Law: Information, Privacy and Smart Contracts" – is taking place at the Hotel Divani Caravel, in central Athens. It is highly anticipated and currently sold out with more than 200 participants. Here’s more information: law.bitcoinschool.gr

Prof Kiayias concludes: "In the near future, this technology will give rise to "cryptolegal" frameworks, that, by merging cryptography and law, will be able to regulate interactions of persons at a global scale. In this way, such frameworks will transcend geographic and jurisdictional boundaries and create a dynamic global social institution that belongs to all and can be abused by none."

Experts in law and cryptography are speaking today at a smart contracts day in Athens, organised by IOHK chief scientist Aggelos Kiayias, chair of cyber security and privacy at the University of Edinburgh as well as director of its Blockchain Technology Laboratory. Smart contracts are an emerging technology that run on the same infrastructure that supports Bitcoin: a blockchain. They are digital legal contracts between parties that rely not on the traditional rule of law and institutions such as legal offices and courts, but on cryptography. Professor Aggelos Kiayias says: "To understand the technology it is useful to contrast cryptography and law. Law regulates interactions between persons ensuring fairness and basic rights. In this way, law offers protection from other persons with conflicting interests by relying on rule of law and social institutions. On the other hand, cryptography is the science of redistributing trust in any system that emerges from the interaction of multiple persons. It also protects people from other persons with conflicting interests but its protection is achieved by relying on hard mathematical problems."

So how do smart contracts work? Prof Kiayias again: "A smart contract is a piece of code written in a formal language that records all terms for a certain engagement. It has the power to self execute when certain conditions are triggered and can enforce its outcomes in a cryptographic sense. There is a multitude of smart contract applications in areas such as intellectual property, financial instruments, rental and leasing agreements and others."

Also speaking at the conference are Charles Hoskinson, IOHK CEO and Co-Founder; Burkard Schafer, Professor of Computational Legal Theory and director of the SCRIPT Centre for IT and IP law at the University of Edinburgh; Peter Van Valkenburgh, Director of Research at Coin Center; and Christoph Sorge, holder of the juris professorship of legal informatics, co-director of the Institute for Law and Informatics, and member of the Center for IT Security, Privacy and Accountability at Saarland University.

Darryl McAdams, IOHK's Team Plutus manager is working on a new programming language for smart contracts (Plutus) and is in Athens for the conference. According to Darryl, "A smart contract is a program which can implement an agreement of one form or another between multiple parties. They can be simple transfers of money, contracts in the traditional sense involving rights and obligations of various parties, or things more complex such as a game of chess, a distributed library, or a decentralized DNS system. In all of these cases, the purpose and behaviour of the system needs to be well understood, and in many cases, such as financial contracts with large sums of money involved, the correctness of the program is absolutely vital. In my talk, I will discuss the design of the Plutus language, a new programming language for authoring smart contracts, and demonstrate its use. I'll also discuss the motivation behind its design, especially with a view towards correct implementation of a contract's purpose and behaviour."

The event – "Smart Contracts Day, Cryptography & Law: Information, Privacy and Smart Contracts" – is taking place at the Hotel Divani Caravel, in central Athens. It is highly anticipated and currently sold out with more than 200 participants. Here’s more information: law.bitcoinschool.gr

Prof Kiayias concludes: "In the near future, this technology will give rise to "cryptolegal" frameworks, that, by merging cryptography and law, will be able to regulate interactions of persons at a global scale. In this way, such frameworks will transcend geographic and jurisdictional boundaries and create a dynamic global social institution that belongs to all and can be abused by none."