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 organising ConsensusDays.| 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.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
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 acess to Web3 services by creating a better client interface and user experience for accessing Web3 content.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
Cryptonet is excited to announce that Ioannis Caragiannis will be supporting the team as a research advisor. Ioannis is a professor at Aarhus University, where he also serves as the head of the research group on computational complexity and game theory.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
In this post, we discuss a recent result from Cryptonet about the impossibility of succinct vector commitments in groups of known prime order.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs 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:| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
CryptoNetLab is pleased to welcome Matteo Campanelli to the team as a research scientist. Matteo previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University (with Claudio Orlandi) and at the IMDEA Software Institute (with Dario Fiore).| Protocol Labs Research
The hard-thinking research scientists of the CryptoEconLab have developed a set of research questions that are particularly appropriate for scoped independent work. These questions can be used to design an MSc thesis or PhD industry-experience project for students in computer science, statistics, complexity science, economics, or related areas, or as the basis for independent research.| Protocol Labs Research
The Network Goods team at Protocol Labs recently held the second in a continuing series of events bringing together researchers and thought leaders to discuss novel experiments and future directions for funding our collective commons.| Protocol Labs Research
CryptoNetLab is excited to announce that Dario Catalano will be supporting the team as a research advisor. Dario is a professor at University of Catania, where he investigates questions related to reducing the gap between theory and practice in cryptography, with a particular focus on developing advanced yet efficient encryption mechanisms and designing secure distributed digital signature schemes.| Protocol Labs Research
We are excited to announce that Alex Terrazas will be guiding and supporting CryptoEconLab as a Technical Program Manager. We asked Alex about his journey to Protocol Labs, the CryptoEconLab projects he will be working on, and his thoughts about future technological developments:| Protocol Labs Research
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).| Protocol Labs Research
ConsensusLab is pleased to welcome Matej Pavlovic to the team. Matej joins us from IBM Research, where he was recently doing research on MirBFT, among other topics in blockchains and distributed systems.| Protocol Labs Research
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: 22 talks 35 submissions 231 registrations 347 members of the #consensus channel 612 members of the ConsensusDays mailing list 614 YouTube views of the raw streams Today, we bring you the final news of the year: the edited talks are now available on YouTube.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs 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.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
Interview between Tom Kalil, Chief Innovation Officer of Schmidt Futures, Dr. Evan Miyazono, Research Team Lead at Protocol Labs, and Dr. Matt Akamatsu, Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of Washington.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
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 recepients.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs 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:| Protocol Labs Research
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
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.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research
Today is my last day at Protocol Labs, after which I am moving on to be the CTO of Lurk Lab. The last five years have gone by in the blink of an eye. As is common in transition, I find myself reflecting on how the past became the present and on the future to come. This post is a whirlwind summary of some of the highlights of my research/development work at Protocol Labs.| Protocol Labs Research
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.| Protocol Labs Research