A farewell to Protocol Labs Research

Reflecting on my time at Protocol Labs Research over the past five years, I can’t help but feel grateful. What began as a journey into uncharted territories of start-up research evolved into an extended mosaic of happy memories.

Private retrieval grant 2023 roundup

We have concluded the initial round of funding decisions for RFP014, a research initiative in collaboration with Arcological, focused on exploring mechanisms for private data retrieval. The objective of RFP014 is to foster the advancement of private communication methods.

Pausing PL Research Open Research Grants

Over the 2022 calendar year, Protocol Labs Research received a tremendous amount of participation and submissions for our Open Research Grants program. Having awarded more than $1 million USD for researchers around the globe, we could not be more proud of the success of this program and the quality of our award recipients.

Generalized Impact Evaluators, A year of experiments and theory

TLDR: Protocol Labs’ Network Funding team is releasing a whitepaper on Impact Evaluators, a funding mechanism designed for nontraditional projects with high uncertainty and high upside. Our goal is to add structure to the ongoing dialogue and share practical implementation advice based on a year of experience.

Announcing the final award for RFP-011, "Changing the Internet"

PL Research is pleased to announce the final research proposal funded as part of the Changing the Internet Initiative: a project by Maria Apostolaki and Jennifer Rexford of Princeton University’s Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science departments, respectively, to improve the state of the art in routing and edge networking.

Gitcoin Grants Round 15: getting DeSci on the SamePage

Protocol Labs is excited to support the Decentralized Science Matching Grant Funding Round in Gitcoin’s GR15, now live until 22 September, 2022. The Gitcoin Grants Program uses quadratic funding to leverage small contributions across a large and diverse network of contributors into large impact –- a new Web3-native way of sustainably funding public goods projects.

Protocol Labs research funding recipients 2022

Protocol Labs Research is thrilled to announce the first research funding recipients of 2022! We fund researchers around the world and have given out 11 awards so far this year. These awards include three RFPs, two Summer Research Grants, five Doctoral fellowships, and one Postdoctoral fellowship.

Introducing ProbeLab

This post was originally published in the IPFS blog and is reprinted here with minor edits. ProbeLab is an effort to apply solid scientific measurement methodologies to benchmark and optimize network protocols that operate in decentralized P2P environments.

Announcing the first award for RFP-011, "Changing the Internet"

PL Research is pleased to announce the first research project funded as part of the Changing the Internet Initiative: a project by Scott Shenker of ICSI and UC Berkeley, Arvind Krishnamurthy of the University of Washington, James McCauley of Mount Holyoke College, and Aurojit Panda of NYU to improve access to Web3 services by creating a better client interface and user experience for accessing Web3 content.

On algebraic vector commitments

In this post, we discuss a recent result from Cryptonet about the impossibility of succinct vector commitments in groups of known prime order.

New open problems in private data retrieval

tl;dr: We’d like to develop additional protocol-compatible primitives allowing users to interact privately with Web3 content. Central to the Web3 vision of an open, permissionless, and decentralized internet is the ability of parties to interact directly and privately with each other while retaining ownership of their data.

Network Research and Bacalhau at DeSci Berlin

The Network Research team was excited to participate in DeSci Berlin, an amazing and very energized “unconference” that brought together researchers, technologists, and enthusiasts of science and web3 to discuss current problems and opportunities in the practice of science and workshop on how blockchain and decentralized technology can solve them.

What are public goods and commons?

Understanding public goods and commons, their role in society, and new opportunities made possible by web3. TLDR: Public goods and Commons are an important class of products that are typically under-funded due to shortcomings in existing market mechanics but create tremendous value for individuals and whole ecosystems.

A deep dive into DKG, chain of SNARKs, and arkworks

In this blog post, I am going to share the main takeaways I have learned while implementing a proof of concept (PoC) of a Distributed Key Generation (DKG) inside of a SNARK.

A Public Goods experiment on Filecoin: Retroactively funding impact with Quadratic Voting

The PL Network Goods team launched a quadratic voting funding experiment on Filecoin repositories with the help of maintainers and storage providers, rewarded community contributors, and built retroactive funding infrastructure for broader application.

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.

Working in public @ ConsensusLab

Do you ever wonder what ConsensusLab is up to? If so, you’re in for a treat! Ever since our launch in July ‘21, we’ve been sharing our work with the broader community – one of our very first initiatives was organizing ConsensusDays.

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).

Changing the Internet

How do you design a general-purpose global communication network? That is the question facing researchers and inventors hoping to create a new internet.

Open problems in incentive research

CryptoEconLab is the PL hub for research in cryptoeconomics, an emerging interdisciplinary field investigating the dynamics of economic coordination games in cryptographically-secured peer-to-peer networks. CryptoEconLab stands at the intersection of computer science, network science, statistics, economics, psychology, decision neuroscience, and system engineering, and the problems it explores have strong resonances with the field of complex systems theory.

Protocol Labs research funding recipients 2021, part 2

Last week we introduced you to the researchers pursuing key problems in cryptography via RFP-009, RFP-010, and a Nucleation Grant. Now we are excited to share the recipients of research awards intended to fund proposals from PhD candidates, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty through our open grant offerings.

Protocol Labs research funding recipients 2021, part 1

This has been a prodigious year for generating new funded collaborations between Protocol Labs Research and top academic researchers around the world! We have given out a whopping eighteen awards since August (with others pending).

A visualization tool for the IPFS DHT

At the Mobile Multimedia Lab of the Athens University of Economics and Business, we have been working on optimizations for the InterPlanetary File System distributed hash table (IPFS DHT) and, in particular, on Multi-Level DHT support.

Increasing software update security through PGP-compatible threshold signatures

Increasing software update security through PGP-compatible threshold signatures. Whether we are aware of them or not, software updates and the systems that support them permeate the current software landscape. Given their pervasiveness, it should come as a surprise that software created to manage such updates, broadly referred to as package managers, still pose security concerns.

CryptoComputeLab announces proofs release version 10.0.0.0

CryptoComputeLab is very proud to release Proofs v10.0.0! A lot has changed under the hood in this release, but ultimately, it comes down to additional GPU support options and better performance during proving.

A rebuttal to the Metaverse as a dystopia

A group of researchers here at PL recently indulged a tirade of mine about the notion that a metaverse is not something that we should want. It seemed worth the time to improve and condense the logic I presented there.

The Winding Journey to Proofs v8.0.0 and beyond

The proofs team is proud to announce the recent proofs releases v8.0.0, v8.0.1, and v8.0.2! These releases are Hyperdrive-enabled, which means that they contain the proof aggregation API that uses SnarkPack – in fact, the major difference between proofs v7.0.x and v8.0.x is the aggregation functionality!

Designing a dataflow editor with TypeScript and React

This is a design report – a story about the tradeoffs and challenges that we encountered while building a medium-complexity React component in TypeScript. These include state modeling (“making illegal states unrepresentable”) basic type-level programming in TypeScript DX patterns for generically typed React components DX patterns for reusable controlled components using a Redux-like action/dispatch state paradigm.

ResNetLab presentations at Devfolio's ETH India 2021 Fellowship

Hot off the heels of ETHDenver, the largest Ethereum community event in North America, the Devfolio team who ran the hackathon platform for the event asked if we’d be interested in doing an IPFS training for another of their programs: the Devfolio Ethereum India Fellowship.

CryptoComputeLab announces proofs release versions 7.0.0 and 7.0.1

The Proofs Team is pleased to announce the recent release of version 7.0.0 of the proofs library. The most notable improvement is that we’ve replaced the old GPU code with the new GPU2 code.

SnarkPack: How to aggregate SNARKs efficiently

A guided dive into the cryptographic techniques of SnarkPack. This post exposes the inner workings of SnarkPack, a practical scheme to aggregate Groth16 proofs, a derivation of the Inner Pairing Product work of Bünz et al.

Decentralized Energy Project recap

Three years ago, we set out to apply the decentralization ethos to the power grid — a complex, sprawling network with some parts dating back over a century. That was the beginning of the Decentralized Energy Project, an effort within AbstractionLab.

CryptoComputeLab announces proofs release 6.1.0

Today we’re proud to announce the recent release of rust-fil-proofs v6.1.0. This release contains a number of significant re-factors and performance optimizations, but we’d like to dig deeper into a couple of them to show some of the real-world impacts.

AbstractionLab Update: notes from the frontier

The independent researchers of the AbstractionLab tackle ambitious projects with huge potential to drive breakthroughs in computing, communication, and decentralization. They are the scout ship pilots exploring the farthest reaches of the adjacent possible.