Hashing It Out

We talk with Kevin Owocki, co-founder of Gitcoin. No joke, this episode is compelling. Gitcoin is a decentralized application which incentives open source contributors with bounties for bugs and features. Kevin tells us about the creation of Gitcoin, how their incentive models work, their architecture, and their alternate funding mechanism for open source projects, CodeFund. We then take a trip to Jupiter and dream of the future of decentralization, theorycrafting what that world will look like and what we need to build to get there. Exciting topics!

In this episode we talk with Stan James, Lead Engineer at Origin Protocol. They are building a mechanism for completely decentralized market listings and purchasing using Ethereum smart contracts. We go over the design, the tools, and the integration pathways for Origin, the challenges faced in designing this protocol, and the layer 2 solutions which improve the service of messaging buyers and sellers in a listing.

We talk to Modular's Chris Brown and Will Dias about their work building libraries for the Ethereum community. These guys are doing some very amazing work directed at financial institutions. Using their libraries, developers can build applications secure in the vetting process the Modular group implements. We talk about their approach of using Solidity libraries rather than smart contract templates, how dapp developers can and should integrate these libraries into their code, and what security concerns are addressed using their system.

Fr8 Protocol is a startup which is creating a standard communication layer to facilitate supply chain logistics using blockhcain as the truth mechanism. This early-stage startup has designed their protocol for improved track and trace, trustless exchange, and network resiliency and is partnering to integrate their protocol into IoT devices. We discuss with their team about the challenges in the space and what they hope their protocol will provide to the world, as well as how such a protocol can be managed trustlessly going forward.

We discuss with Ryan and Kristoffer from FOAM about their protocol which verifies location in a blockchain. Their innovative protocol uses LoRa, blockchain consensus, and a triangulation mechanism called Proof of Location to verify an agents location at a certain point in time. Using their proposed Crypto Spatial Standard, entities can report their location to the blockchain which agent devices known as "anchors" verify for use in consensus applications. Truly amazing technology with massive implications!

On this compelling broadcast, we interview Thaer Khawaja, creator of Masari protocol. Masari is an early-stage cryptocurrency which derives its ideas from Monero to provide transaction privacy. Masari has the additional goal of scalability and is developing its own method of partitioning a blockchain called the block tree, which hopes to enable dynamic scaling on the chain. We go over the idea of block tree, some of the challenges it hopes to address, the challenges to be faced on the Masari roadmap, and the motivations behind developing a new coin. [https://getmasari.org/](https://getmasari.org/) [https://github.com/masari-project](https://github.com/masari-project) [https://twitter.com/masaricurrency](https://twitter.com/masaricurrency)

Today Corey and Collin talk with Logan Brutsche, the creator of ToastyCoin, about the concept of “cryptoeconomic primitives.” He is setting up an academy to walk people through what those are, and how to start making them in a collaborative manner to push the blockchain community forward in a secure and safe manner. Come listen and learn, then join his academy and learn more. **Links: ** – Reddit thread: [https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/8smqe0/creating\_useful\_dapps\_is\_easier\_than\_people\_think/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/8smqe0/creating_useful_dapps_is_easier_than_people_think/) – Website: [http://cpacademy.io/](http://cpacademy.io/)

A set of notes were just released for a revised version of the Casper protocol which merges its goals with sharding research. It uses a beacon chain to behave as a source of randomness with the RANDAO being central to that chain. This enables a commitee of validators to be selected for validating individual shards rather than the entire chain and sign it using BLS signatures. Corey Petty and Collin Cusce discuss these notes and try to suss out what this means for Ethereum if it were implemented. [https://notes.ethereum.org/SCIg8AH5SA-O4C1G1LYZHQ?view#Beacon-chain-state-transition-function](https://notes.ethereum.org/SCIg8AH5SA-O4C1G1LYZHQ?view#Beacon-chain-state-transition-function) [https://github.com/randao/randao](https://github.com/randao/randao) [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.09437.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.09437.pdf)

In this episode, we dive into NuCypher. NuCypher is an encryption library for managing key access on decentralized networks. We talk about proxy re-encryption, how access is granted, and the creation of their node network. We also discuss the topic of fully homomorphic encryption and the role of privacy in future decentralized applications.

TrueBit is one of the more impressive decentralized projects, and we're really excited to have had the chance to interview Harley Swick, core developer on the project. We talk to him about TrueBit, how it works, it's significance, how it differentiates itself from other off-chain computation projects. We go over some of the many, many applications of decentralized off-chain computation projects and how they can improve world resource utilization. Amazing and really exciting stuff! [https://truebit.io/](https://truebit.io/) [https://medium.com/truebit](https://medium.com/truebit) [https://twitter.com/truebitprotocol](https://twitter.com/truebitprotocol) [https://twitter.com/hdswick](https://twitter.com/hdswick)

The prodigious Rick Dudley talks with us about his work as a consensus subject matter expert. He lends us his experience and wisdom in consulting for the creation of Byzantine Fault Tolerant systems. We also delve into what it takes to build a completely decentralized public data storage system and why it's such a difficult problem.

We talk with Mahnush Movahedi of DFINITY to explain the fundamental innovation behind DFINITY's consensus system. She explains how threshold relay works, how groups are determined in consensus, and how cryptographic deterministic randomness drive consensus as a fast and light-weight substitute for Proof of Work. We learn about how this impacts the architecture for state and network protocol design. This episode really shows why Mahnush, a PhD Yale postdoctoral computer scientist with a focus on multiparty computation, would choose DFINITY as the project to join to innovate on consensus protocols. [https://dfinity.org/scholarships](https://dfinity.org/scholarships) - DFINITY Scholarship Program [https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.04548](https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.04548) - DFINITY Consensus System

On this stupendous episode of Hashing It Out, we touch base with Hunter Prendergast and Forrest Marshall of MIMIR Blockchain Solutions about the technology behind their multi-chain blockchain service provider system. They discuss some of the economics behind developing their staking mechanism for ensuring trust in their network. We get into some of the challenges their system is tackling and it's unique approach which sets it apart from Layer 2 scaling solutions that exist.

This week's episode features Stuart Popejoy, founder of the Kadena, creator of the Pact smart contract language, and engineer/designer of the Chainweb blockchain protocol. We go in-depth on design decisions for Pact, how language simplicity impacts the security and adoption of second generation blockchains, how formal verification can be used to improve certainty in smart contracts, and the over-emphasis of Turing completeness for a very domain-specific language such as smart contracts. We go into the design behind Chainweb, an unboundedly scalable Proof of Work blockchain architecture, which expects to reach a whopping 10,000 tx/sec (864,000,000 tx/day) on its first year of release.

We had the pleasure of interviewing Zaki Manian, prolific engineer, Founder of SkuChain, Head of Tendermint Labs, Advisor on the Interchain Foundation, and Executive Directory of the Trusted IoT Alliance. Phew, that's a lot of hats. Zaki gives us a glimpse into what it's like designing a scalable, secure consensus protocol. We speak to him about the philosophy behind scaling solutions, the differences in approach to consensus mechanisms, the role of blockchain as the world grows accustom to trust, and get a really solid look into the history of the blockchain space that led to where we are today.

Will O'Beirne of MyCrypto talks with us about front end dapp development, conveying trust to your end-user on trustless networks, deployment methodology for decentralized systems, and what it takes to build a product in this early stage of blockchain development. We also go over some of the project libraries and tools used in creating MyCrypto. It's a compelling take on how UX design can inform product growth.

Fabian Vogelsteller, creator of the Mist wallet, Web3.js, the history of the ERC20 Token standard, and his ERC725 Identity proposal. He speaks to us about his new industry effort, Lukso ([https://www.lukso.io/](https://www.lukso.io/)), which marries blockchain to luxury goods supply chain solutions. He speaks to us about adoption, data governance, industry network effects, and how to bring enterprises to blockchain. We get into his thoughts on standardization to build open communication protocols for building bridges between collaborators, regulators, and end consumers to ensure data integrity. We speak to him about the impact of the ERC20 standard proposal and how it has fostered a $6 billion ecosystem.

Orie Steele, CTO of Transmute Industries. Orie is the creator of the Transmute Platform, a rapid application development framework for centralized, decentralized, and hybrid Ethereum applications and services. We discuss language features of Solidity, scalability paradigms such as Truebit, building blockchain architectures, and off-chain scalability. We pull from his cyber security training to talk about security and best practices in smart contract development.

Part of the Bitcoin Podcast Network, we have a new show where we interview Nick Johnson of the Ethereum Foundation. He talks about the Ethereum Name Service (ENS). ENS is bringing human-understandable naming to address resources both on-chain and off-chain. Nick is incorporating a new non-profit organization to support the efforts to build out a decentralized system for creating and managing these names. In addition, we pull from his expertise as go-ethereum engineer to get his take on dapp usability, solidity language quirks, blockchain scaling, and our blockchain-driven future.