News | Protocol Labs Research

ConsensusDays 23 recordings now available

ConsensusDays 23 took place 5-6 June and we have another successful edition to celebrate! Beyond the exciting programme, here are a few stats from this year:

Today, we bring you the final news of the year: the edited talks are now available on YouTube.

ConsensusDays 23 programme and registration

We’re happy to announce the publication of the ConsensusDays 23 programme. The workshop will take place 5-6 June in the 14:00-18:30 UTC period. We were again overwhelmed by the community interest, and many decisions ended up coming down to program limitations and session planning rather than quality alone.

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.

Cryptonet launches new open source SNARK system

Testudo is a new open source SNARK system developed by Cryptonet that offers efficient proofs with smaller setups. It uses polynomial commitments and sumchecks to prove the satisfiability of an R1CS system, and applies several optimizations to reduce the trusted setup size, improve proving times, and achieve fast verification and small proof size.

New directions in Network Research

As Protocol Lab’s footprint in the public goods space has grown, the Network Research team has taken the lead on integrating and adapting PL’s work to the needs and interests of the scientific community, with the goal of designing and building public goods to move science forward faster.

ConsensusDay 23: deadline extended to 19 Mar

We have already received a number of excellent submissions for ConsensusDay 23 but have decided to extend the submission deadline in order to accommodate several pending contributions. We will therefore be accepting submissions until the end of Sunday, 19 March, anywhere on earth.

ConsensusDay 23: call for contributions

ConsensusDay is back! We’re returning to our roots and organising a virtual event on 5 June 2023, in a format similar to the 2021 edition. That means we will not be publishing proceedings this year and therefore welcome both novel contributions and those under review or published elsewhere in the last 12 months.

The Filecoin Spacenet goes live

For all of the past year, our team at ConsensusLab has been hard at work pushing the boundaries of Filecoin scalability and devising a framework for horizontal scaling that allows for the seamless spawning of interoperable subnets, as well as a reference implementation of a consensus algorithm suitable for running said subnets.

Join us in Lisbon for the ConsensusLab Summit

In less than two weeks, the Protocol Labs Network will be meeting in Lisbon, Portugal for LabWeek22, a decentralised conference and a first for us. ConsensusLab will also be present, and we’re organising our own event: the ConsensusLab Summit.

Raymond Cheng joins PL Research

We are excited to welcome Raymond Cheng to the Protocol Labs Research team. We asked Raymond about his journey to Protocol Labs, the projects he will be working on, and his thoughts about future technological developments:

Consensusday 22: programme now live!

Consensusday 22 is fast approaching! The workshop, which will be co-located with ACM CCS this year, will take place 7 November in Los Angeles. We have another exciting programme for this edition, comprising 15 talks that cover assumptions, PoS security, leader election, performance, and more.

Introducing Cryptonet network grants

Originally founded to drive the creation of Filecoin, Cryptonet set out to create a community of researchers and engineers working on designing, proving, improving the building blocks for crypto-networks to engender new capabilities across the Web 3.

Announcing RFP-014: The one with private retrieval

Can we speak privately? Unfortunately, our current options for private communication are limited, hamstrung by their reliance on a single-trusted-origin data publication model, high latencies, and security vulnerabilities. We think it is possible to design a scalable system that doesn’t sacrifice latency for privacy.

The Pikachu RFP: Checkpointing Filecoin onto Bitcoin

Blockchains based on a reusable resource (such as proof-of-stake or proof-of-space) are not as secure as those based on proof-of-work. Specifically, they are vulnerable to long-range attacks (LRA), where an adversary can create a long fork very cheaply.

Streamlining our grantmaking framework

In our ongoing quest to continuously improve the UX around our research grants programme, we’re announcing today a number of updates to both the framework and the operations that should enable a more streamlined, faster, and easier experience for all stakeholders.

Guy Goren joins ConsensusLab as a Research Scientist

ConsensusLab is excited to welcome Guy Goren to the team! Guy joins us from Technion, where his PhD research focused on distributed data structures and algorithms, and particularly blockchain protocols.

Akosh Farkash joins ConsensusLab as a Research Engineer

ConsensusLab are excited to welcome Akosh Farkash to the team! Akosh joins us from IOHK and CasperLabs, where he helped develop robust and performant blockchain systems, mainly working in Scala and Rust.

ConsensusFactory summary and recordings

Last Wednesday, we hosted the first edition of ConsensusFactory: Decentralized Reflections on Consensus, a new virtual event that brought together speakers from different blockchain ecosystems to talk about the scalability strategies each of their projects are pursuing.

ConsensusLab welcomes its 2022 summer fellows!

The ConsensusLab team is excited to welcome our first summer research fellows, who will be joining us at different times throughout the summer to work on some of our core research projects.

Join us on 22 June for ConsensusFactory!

Are you interested in consensus and distributed system scalability? So are we! That’s why we’re organizing ConsensusFactory, a new virtual event that will bring together speakers from different blockchain ecosystems, who will present the scalability approaches they are exploring.

Abby Silin joins PL Research

We are excited to welcome Abby Silin as a Research Administrator at Protocol Labs. We asked Abby about what brought her to Protocol Labs, the projects she’ll be working on, and her thoughts on future technological developments:

ConsensusDay 22: call for contributions

After a wildly successful 2021 edition, ConsensusDay is back for 2022! The goal remains the same: to provide a forum for the discussion of early-stage but high-impact research with scientific interest and real-world applications and to build a community around it.

Sergey Fedorov joins ConsensusLab as a Research Engineer

ConsensusLab are excited to welcome Sergey Fedorov to the team! Sergey joins us from NEC Laboratories Europe, where he spent the last 5 years working on security topics, including blockchain technologies.

Introducing our new grant spectrum

Protocol Labs Research is committed to supporting the innovation needed to build our decentralized future. Today we are pleased to announce the expansion of the PL Research Grant Program to include a variety of new funding opportunities designed to support collaborative work on problems defined by the broader research community and critical to our work at Protocol Labs.