Alfonso De La Rocha | Protocol Labs Research
Alfonso de la Rocha
Research Engineer/ ConsensusLab
Education
MSc in Network Services and Systems, 2017
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
MSc in Telecommunication Engineering, 2017
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
BSc in Telecommunication Engineering, 2014
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Before joining Protocol Labs, Alfonso worked as a blockchain expert at Telefónica R&D, where he was responsible for the design and development of core technology based on blockchains, distributed systems, and advanced cryptography. Alfonso’s involvement in research and development began at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, where he worked on topics related to energy efficiency in data centers. His broad R&D experience also includes research into the compression efficiency of video coding standards at Ericsson Research and projects related to securing interdomain routing protocols at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
Alfonso is also an avid reader and basketball lover.
Areas of Expertise
Distributed Systems, Networking, Cryptography
Talks
2022-11-21
Interplanetary Consensus: Now playing in Eudico near you
ConsensusLab Summit / 2022.10.27 / Lisbon, Portugal
2022-06-24
Hierarchical consensus: A horizontal scaling framework for blockchains
ConsensusFactory / 2022.06.22
2022-03-11
Hierarchical consensus project update
ConsensusLab 22Q2 Team Week / 2022.02.07 / Dubai, UAE
2022-02-23
Filecoin hierarchical consensus
Protocol Labs Research Talks / 2022.02.03
2021-08-02
IPFS-FAN: A function addressible computation network
DI2F / 2021.06.21 / Espoo, Finland
2021-02-23
Beyond swapping bits
Protocol Labs Research Talks / 2021.02.23
Publications
2022-12-13/Conference paper
Enriching Kademlia by partitioning
Decentralizing the Web is becoming an increasingly interesting endeavor that aims at improving user security and privacy as well as providing guaranteed ownership of content. One such endeavor that pushes towards this reality, is Protocol Labs’ Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS) network, that provides a decentralized large scale file system to support the decentralized Web.
2022-03-11/Conference paper
Hierarchical consensus: A horizontal scaling framework for blockchains
We present the Filecoin Hierarchical Consensus framework, which aims to overcome the throughput challenges of blockchain consensus by horizontally scaling the network. Unlike traditional sharding designs, based on partitioning the state of the network, our solution centers on the concept of subnets –which are organized hierarchically– and can be spawned on-demand to manage new state.
2021-06-11/Conference paper
IPFS-FAN: A function-addressable computation network
Permissionless computation is one of the missing pieces in the web3 stack in order to have all the tools needed to “decentralise Internet services”. There are already proposals to embed computation in decentralised networks like smart contracts, or blockchain networks for computational offloading.
2021-01-14/Report
Accelerating content routing with Bitswap: A multi-path file transfer protocol in IPFS and Filecoin
Bitswap is a Block Exchange protocol designed for P2P Content Addressable Networks. It leverages merkle-linked graphs in order to parallelize retrieval and verify content integrity. Bitswap is being used in the InterPlanetary File System architecture as the main content exchange protocol, as well as in the Filecoin network as part of the block synchronisation protocol.
Blog Posts
2023-04-20/News
IPC subnets land on Filecoin Spacenet
The Interplanetary Consensus framework (IPC), formerly known as Hierarchical Consensus, addresses two challenges of blockchain networks, transaction volume and application heterogeneity. In doing so, it boosts the capabilities of the Filecoin network.
2022-04-20/Blog
The first graduating class of ConsensusLab projects
When ConsensusLab launched last year, we published a roadmap covering our first 18 months. We are still working towards that same roadmap, with minor adjustments over time to accommodate the changing landscape and externalities.
2022-03-03/Blog
Scaling blockchains with hierarchical consensus
Scaling blockchains is not an easy task. Less so if one is looking to accommodate not only crypto-native use cases but also Web 2.0-like applications handling significant volumes of data at high throughput (of the kind that you would host with your preferred cloud provider).