Theory and Practice of Blockchains is a series of events organized by the Department of Information and Communication Technologies at Pompeu Fabra University in collaboration with the Concordium Blockchain Research Center at Aarhus University bringing together researchers working on the theory and implementation of blockchains.

The program includes recent research in the sub-themes of consensus protocols, zero-knowledge proofs, privacy, and anonymity-preserving techniques, language design and semantics for smart contracts, formal verification of cryptographic protocols, and implementations, among other relevant topics. The workshop aims to enable interdisciplinary research and foster collaboration among theoreticians and practitioners in blockchain protocols, distributed systems, and cryptography.

Program

Talks are going to be held every Wednesday from 17 to 19/19:30 CEST, starting on May 27th. Each seminar will consist on at least an invited talk, a virtual coffee break and two contributed talks.

You will receive a confirmation email with all technicalities before each seminar.

27/05/2020

17-17:30 Mechanized proof for the Libra blockchain - François Garillot (Novi)

17:30-18 Social Break

18-18:30 ConCert: A Smart Contract Certification Framework in Coq - D. Annenkov, J. B. Nielsen and B. Spitters

18:30-19 Leveraging Weight Functions for Optimistic Responsiveness in Blockchains - S.H. Kamp, B. Magri, C. Matt, J.B. Nielsen, S.E. Thomsen, D. Tschudi

03/06/2020

17-17:30 The potentiality of linear-time proofs - Jens Groth (DFINITY)

17:30-18 Social Break

18-18:30 Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Set Membership: Efficient, Succinct, Modular - D. Benarroch, M. Campanelli, D. Fiore, D. Kolonelos and K. Gurkan

18:30-19 Securing Proof-of-Work Ledgers via Checkpointing - D. Karakostas and A. Kiayias

10/06/2020

17-17:30 On the Optimality of Optimistic Responsiveness - Kartik Nayak (Duke)

17:30-18 Social Break

18-18:30 Making Byzantine Consensus Live - M. Bravo, G. Chockler and A. Gotsman

18:30-19 Security Analysis of Ripple Consensus - I. Amores-Sesar, C. Cachin and J. Mićić

17/06/2020

17-17:30 Transitioning from academic research to entrepreneurship. Lessons learnt & beyond off-chain. - Patrick McCorry (PISA Research)

17:30-18 Social Break

18-18:30 Cerberus Channels: Incentivizing Watchtowers for Bitcoin - Z. Avarikioti. O. Stefanos, T. Litos and R. Wattenhofer

18:30-19 Publicly Verifiable Zero Knowledge from (Collapsing) Blockchains - A. Scafuro, L. Siniscalchi and I. Visconti

24/06/2020

17-17:30 The Journey to Libra Blockchain Core and Beyond - Dahlia Malkhi (Novi)

17:30-18 Social Break with special participation from Concordium, Aeternity and iden3

18-18:30 Refresh When You Wake Up: Proactive Threshold Wallets with Offline Devices - Y. Kondi, B. Magri, C. Orlandi and O. Shlomovits

18:30-19 Mi-Cho-Coq, a framework for certifying Tezos Smart Contracts - B. Bernardo, R. Cauderlier, Z. Hu, B. Pesin and J. Tesson

19-19:30 Ledger Combiners for Fast Settlement - M. Fitzi, P. Gaži, A. Kiayias and A. Russell

01/07/2020

17-17:30 Vector Commitment Techniques and Applications to Verifiable Decentralized Storage - M. Campanelli, D. Fiore, N. Greco, D. Kolonelos and L. Nizzardo

17:30-18 Reputable List Curation from Decentralized Voting - Mary Maller (Ethereum Foundation)

18-18:30 Social Break

18:30-19 Proof-of-Burn - K. Karantias, A. Kiayias and D. Zindros

19-19:30 Consensus based on Virtual ASICs - C. Ganesh, C. Orlandi, D. Tschudi and A. Zohar

08/07/2020

17-17:30 Mir-BFT: Robust Scaling of Classical BFT - Marko Vukolic (IBM)

17:30-18 Social Break

18-18:30 Divide and Scale: Formalization of Distributed Ledger Sharding Protocols - Z. Avarikioti, E. Kokoris-Kogias and R. Wattenhofer

18:30-19 Better Randomness Beacons and MPC with Financial Penalties from Time-Lock Puzzles - C. Baum, B. David;, R. Dowsley, J. B. Nielsen and S. Oechsner

15/07/2020

17-17:30 Blinder – MPC Based Scalable and Robust Anonymous Committed Broadcast - A. P. Yanay, B. Pinkas and I. Abraham

17:30-18 Employing user-selected committees for scalability and confidentiality - Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias (EPFL)

18-18:30 Social Break - AMA David Chaum

18:30-19 Incentive Attacks on Smart Contracts and Blockchains - Ittay Eyal (Technion)

19-19:30 Ethna: Channel Network with Dynamic Internal Payment Splitting - S. Dziembowski and P. Kedzior

Stay in Touch

Join our TPBC Zulip chat and add the seminar series to your calendar!

For further information and a detailed list of the program, please visit our webpage or contact us at tpbc2020@upf.edu.