Background
A common challenge that blockchain technologies need to tackle is scalability. Existing blockchain systems generally have high latency and can only have tens of transactions per second, whereas credit card companies such as Mastercard or Visa carry out thousands of transactions per second. One prominent solution to scalability for blockchains is to run many chains in parallel, often called sharding.
In the last decade, multiple blockchain protocols targeting different use cases and relying on a multitude of technologies have emerged. The majority of them are not compatible and cannot interoperate, which poses the risk of isolation, fragmentation of services, and eventually failure for end-user adoption.
This weakness contributes to other shortcomings of the decentralized web, such as scalability, and makes it impossible to provide a usable alternative to the centralized web, even in a setting where trusted third parties are obvious security holes.
During the last couple of years, the community has realized this challenge and is set to enable interaction between different chains through building interoperability mechanisms.
The goals of this workshop are to review the state-of-the-art research and practices, discuss existing challenges in terms of security and performance, trigger new research directions, and tighten collaborations between academia and pioneering projects who are familiar with practical challenges.
Workshop Chairs
Fatemeh Shirazi - Web3 Foundation
Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias - IST Austria
Organizers
Kristen Jäggi - Web3 Foundation
Sonja Lingchungtsang - Web3 Foundation
Event Information
Registration: The workshop will take place online. Attendance to
the workshop is free of charge
Date: October 16, 2020
Tentative Schedule (all times are in CEST)
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3:00 pm — 3:30 pmAlexei ZamyatinTrustless Cross-Chain Communication Impossible, but incentive compatible?Imperial College London, UK - Interlay
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3:30 pm — 4:00 pmPramod ViswanathFree2Shard: Identity free ShardingUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, US
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4:00 pm — 4:30 pmChristopher GoesSovereign to Sharded: The Shared Security SpectrumInterchain GmbH (Cosmos)
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4:30 pm — 5:00 pmDankrad FeistValidity and the future of blockchainsEthereum Foundation (ETH2.0)
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5:00 pm — 5:30 pmRachid Guerraoui“Bitcoin is an easy problem”EPFL, Switzerland
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5:30 pm — 6:00 pmPedro Moreno-SanchezSecurity, Privacy and Interoperability in Payment-Channel HubsIMDEA, Spain
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6:00 pm — 6:30 pmGeorge DanezisFastPay: High-Performance Byzantine Fault Tolerant SettlementUniversity College London, UK - Facebook Novi
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6:30 pm — 7:00 pmAlistair StewartIs Slashing a good idea? ...and how to apply it to scaling in proof of stakeWeb3 Foundation (Polkadot)