Hashing It Out

We have the great honor of speaking with Dr. Patrick McCorry, lecturer at King's College London and expert in cryptocurrency research. This conversation focuses on state channel research. We go over the latest and greatest in that field, what advancements have achieved, and what is yet to be done. It's exciting to learn from someone with such an extremely deep knowledge on the subject of state channels!

We have the great pleasure of speaking with Omer Shlomovits. Omer is a multi-party computation and cryptography expert with KZen. He speaks to us about KZen, his research on threshold signatures for building simpler and more secured wallets, key recovery schemes, and the future of multi-party computation. Fantastic episode choked full of deep knowledge!

Managing crypto keys is difficult enough for private holders, but when managing large portfolios of cryptocurrency assets on an institutional level, the risk surface increases tremendously. Base Zero has devised a suite of tools to manage multisignature signing over an air-gapped signing device and a sharded backup system to ensure security for large organizations. This unique approach enables these institutions to mitigate risk associated with large fund transfers without any one single person being able to compromise the system and with highly secured disaster recovery.

We have the pleasure to present one of the more entertaining speakers at SBC19, Dan Robinson. After two talks on Hash Time Locked Contracts (HTLCs), he drops a massive bomb in with a slide deck entitled, "HTLCs (And why they suck)." Lively and entertaining, we have him step through is thoughts on HTLCs and the alternate solutions to this technique that Interleger implements. Bombastic show chocked full information and analysis!

Back with season 2 of Hashing It Out, and we have a doozy! This Episode features Trail of Bits and ChainSecurity to talk about their amazing last-minute catch of EIP-1283's impact on the Constantinople Ethereum hard fork. We go over how they found it, what recommendations they made, and how the hard fork was postponed to quickly. We also discuss the tooling behind analyzing such a vulnerability, the true impact had it been released, and how the processes around hard fork release candidates could be altered by this detection. **Links:** - [empire hacking videos]([https://blog.trailofbits.com/2019/01/18/empire-hacking-ethereum-edition-2/](https://blog.trailofbits.com/2019/01/18/empire-hacking-ethereum-edition-2/)) - [EIP-1283 Analysis]([https://github.com/trailofbits/publications/blob/master/reviews/EIP-1283.pdf](https://github.com/trailofbits/publications/blob/master/reviews/EIP-1283.pdf)) - [contract upgrade anti-patterns]([https://blog.trailofbits.com/2018/09/05/contract-upgrade-anti-patterns/](

File storage has long been known as a centralized solution. Storj seeks to change this with their decentralized file storage and retrieval architecture. We'll go over their design, engineering goals, and challenges. We dive deep into how erasure codes can be used to mitigate replication requirements, how trust is managed on their decentralized platform, and how one can be incentivized to donate their storage space and bandwidth to the world through their network. \*\*Links\*\* https://storj.io/ https://github.com/Storj/

Plasma is one of the strongest candidates for Layer 2 scaling solutions. Since the Plasma whitepaper was released in August 2017, there's been a multitude of Plasma implementations experimenting with the idea. On this episode we feature Georgios Kosntantoploulos, Lead Researcher at Loom Network, to talk about Plasma, the different variations, and the future of scaling through Layer 2 solutions. [https://github.com/loomnetwork/plasma-paper](https://github.com/loomnetwork/plasma-paper) [https://www.gakonst.com/](https://www.gakonst.com/)

Grid+ is one of the most legitimate and exciting products utilizing blockchain in the space, so we're very excited to present Alex Miller (CTO) and Karl Kreder (VP Hardware) on our program. We discuss their line of blockchain appliances, how they're built, their design philosophies, and the challenges in building hardware for blockchains. We get to hear some of their thoughts on the future of blockchain and consensus protocols, and where they see the world moving into the future as decentralization becomes and adopted norm.

This episode features Michael O'Rourke (CEO) and Luis C. de Leon (CTO) of Pocket. Pocket is a chain-agnostic decentralized AWS for blockchain full nodes. In a world where full nodes become more expensive to run, Pokt aims to have people host their nodes in their network by registering it with their Proof of Stake blockchain. Using Pokt tokens, someone can rent usage of the full node, using the node's stake as a guarantee of availability, removing the concern of maintaining one's own hardware (virtual or otherwise) to create a decentralized application.

On this episode, we have the extreme pleasure of interviewing Michael Yuan, Chief Scientist at CyberMiles. CyberMiles is building a blockchain platform targeted for e-commerce with those concerns in mind. Using a fork of Ethereum and the Ethereum toolsets, CyberMiles has an upgraded EVM with support for extended and extensible opcodes and a dPoS consensus system for validators to stake into the network. Their research is pushing the limits of what the existing technology can do, and they have some amazing progress in proving alternative systems for developing blockchain. Michael is a very exceptional scientists in this space, and he and Collin had a great conversation, not just about CyberMiles, but the space in general. **Links** [https://www.cybermiles.io](https://www.cybermiles.io) [https://github.com/cybermiles](https://github.com/cybermiles) [https://twitter.com/juntao](https://twitter.com/juntao) [https://medium.com/@michaelyuan\_88928](https://medium.com/@michaelyuan_88928)

Alex va de Sande is a UX designer and developer for the Ethereum foundation who has come up with a new, clean way to provide universal login capability to any decentralized application. Using a combination of standards such as ERC725 identity contracts and his proposed ERC1077 and ERC1078, he has created a way to login across any application using a single login mechanism. We go over his system, his views on the challenges behind adoption that UX can solve, and the future of DApps as they begin implementing standards such as universal logins. **Links** [https://universallogin.io/](https://universallogin.io/) [https://twitter.com/avsa](https://twitter.com/avsa) [https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-1078.md](https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-1078.md) [https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-1077.md](https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-1077.md)

So you have a decentralize app you want to use... how do you know its smart contracts are safe? That's where Panvala comes in! Using their system you can certify the security and authenticity of your smart contracts and obtain a mark in proof of this certification. On this episode we talk with its co-founder, Niran Babalola, about their smart contract registry and certification system. We learn of its process, development, and larger implications. We learn what it takes to get from zero to one in a project that requires community participation to improve the certification process. **Links** [https://www.panvala.com/](https://www.panvala.com/) [https://twitter.com/niran](https://twitter.com/niran)

Blockchain hipsters, we have a treat: Dr. Weyl, co-author of Radical Markets. His book quickly became a popular with us in decentralization. The book proposes new ways to create marketplaces to provide better opportunities for optimal redistribution of resources. This has especially strong implications for those designing decentralized systems and applications. We talk with him about his book, the motivations behind radical markets, and potential futures involving his schemes. Blockchain hipsters, we have a treat: Dr. Weyl, co-author of Radical Markets. His book quickly became a popular with us in decentralization. The book proposes new ways to create marketplaces to provide better opportunities for optimal redistribution of resources. This has especially strong implications for those designing decentralized systems and applications. We talk with him about his book, the motivations behind radical markets, and potential futures involving his schemes. **Links** [http://radicalmarkets.com/](http:

Great Caesar's Ghost! NuCypher has demo'd a practical fully-homomorphic encryption (FHE) scheme that leverages an Ethereum smart contract for a proof mechanism. We get to go over FHE: what it is, how it works, how it commits to the blockchain, scaling issues, and the future of encrypted computation. This will enable new privacy mechanisms on layer 2 solutions which interface with the blockchain cheaply and efficiently. Very big stuff for anyone trying to use blockchain as a resolution mechanism but wants to hide their business rules in the process! **Links** [https://blog.nucypher.com/releasing-nufhe-library-b5f9345dc1fb](https://blog.nucypher.com/releasing-nufhe-library-b5f9345dc1fb) [https://github.com/nucypher/nufhe](https://github.com/nucypher/nufhe)

Today we have the pleasure of interviewing Iuri Matias of Embark Framework. Embark is a decentralized application framework that abstracts away the implementation details of specific technologies, allowing dapp developers to focus on what really matters, the experience. We talk about the features of Embark, the design decisions of the framework, and how Embark will integrate new technologies into their systems as they develop. **Links:** - [embark.status.im](http://embark.status.im) - [twitter.com/iurimatias](http://twitter.com/iurimatias)

Anonymity is dead... or so you thought. Marrying the technologies behind onion routing and Monero, the Loki network enables a private cryptocurrency and messaging service that hides information down to the network layer. This fascinating approach scales its privacy mechanism in the same way that Tor does and incentives those who run Loki service nodes through their Proof of Service mechanism. Tools like this keep your transactions and traffic private from any spying eyes and makes it increasingly difficult to leverage your network data as a means to track your activity.

Revolutionary! On this episode we have the brilliant Dr. Gün Sirer to whet our appetites for Avalanche, a new category of consensus protocol. He distinguishes Avalanche from Paxos/RAFT systems, blockchain, and traditional gossip networks to show how this new algorithm prevents double spends while allowing for high throughput (early tests supporting over 1200 tx/s). We learn about his new coin, Ava, which will test the limits of Avalanche's public consensus on a global scale! The future is exciting!

Danny Ryan from Ethereum comes on to speak with us about the Casper Sharding v2.1 specification. Casper Sharding is a combined effort between the migration to Proof of Stake and Sharding for Ethereum. We go over the motivations behind the new specification, the research efforts underway, the architecture and design, and even how Ethereum can maintain liveness during a major world catastrophic event. There's so much information to cover, and we only scratched the surface. The future of Ethereum looks exciting!

The famous Bernhard Mueller joined us today to talk about the fantastic work being done to beef up his already amazing tool, Mythril. The new Mythril platform beefs up the symbolic analyzer as well as adding static analysis tools and linters (Maru), a dynamic analyzer and input fuzzer (Harvey) and an API for easy integration into a developer's processes. We dive into what brought Bernhard to write Mythril and how it's taken off as a premier auditing tool. We also get into the future of security tools and how the processes being developed today will inform best practices of the future.

In this episode, we interview Kacper Bak, Research Engineer at Quanstamp. Quantstamp has created a system for auditing smart contracts automatically, testing for known exploits. They verify the more common attack vectors, and provide a report to the user about the potential threat. We go into how their product is built, the future of their product, and how it can benefit and drive future innovation. **Links:** – [smart contract security alliance](https://www.smartcontractsecurityalliance.com/) – [secureth community](https://secureth.org) – [quantstamp website](https://quantstamp.com/)