August Newsletter — Cerberus
At PISA Research, our goal is to build the missing components for an off-chain, open-source, global and permissionless financial system. Over the past few years, we have assisted in setting the foundation for off-chain scalability and now our task is to ensure that crypto, via off-chain, will be adopted by billions of users.
👷👷👷👷 Implementation Update 👷👷👷👷
One thing we must make clear:
The PISA we are implementing, compared to PISA in the white paper, is a VERY different protocol.
We have essentially designed a new accountable watching protocol that extends beyond supporting just state channels. It is still based on the underlying principle of locking up collateral and holding the watching service financially accountable, but PISA is now a general watch-response system:
- Eventual delivery: PISA will deliver a transaction between time t1 and t2.
- Completing 2-step protocols: PISA will watch for a general event and respond within a given time period if necessary.
Thus PISA is so much more useful than just off-chain protocols.
- Have you sent a sealed bid to an on-chain auction, but do not want to stay online to reveal it? Hire PISA
- Do you need a financially accountable meta-transaction relayer to avoid paying gas? Hire PISA
- As a merchant — do you want to accept 0-confirmation transactions and pass the liability onto someone else? Hire PISA
In the coming months, we plan to provide an in-depth technical writeup for the new accountable responder protocol (Cerberus). But right now — we are just building, building, building — to make sure we ship and get it into the hands of users.
A quick update for the Bitcoin development front — we have an alpha watching service for the lightning network. So if you want to try it out, get in touch!
🎉🎉🎉🎉 Advances in Financial Technologies 🎉🎉🎉🎉
An emerging ACM conference organised by a killer-team of academics, it is set as the first top-tier conference to showcase rigorous designs and developments for cryptocurrencies.
We are proud to have two papers accepted by the program committee:
It helps confirm that our work is indeed state-of-the-art, novel and pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved.
Also — want to catch up with us and find out more?
🙌🙌🙌🙌 Upcoming events 🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌
- Patrick McCorry — Overview of Off-chain Protocols — Calibra in SF (8th August)
- Chris Buckland —Panelist — Layer 2 meetup during Berlin Week (21st August)
- Patrick McCorry — Building a Financially Accountable Responder — ETHBerlin (23–25th August)
- Patrick McCorry— Towards an Open-source and Off-chain Financial Network —1st International Summer School on Security & Privacy for Blockchains and Distributed Ledger Technologies (4th September)
- Patrick McCorry — Towards an Open-source and Off-chain Financial Network — DeFi Summit (10th September)
- Sergi Delgado — TxProbe: Discovering Bitcoin’s Network Topology Using Orphan Transactions — Scaling Bitcoin (11th September)
- Patrick McCorry — PISA: Arbitration Outsourcing for State Channels — Scaling Bitcoin (12th September)
- Patrick McCorry — Fighting the Liveness Requirement for Commitchains — Starkware Sessions (16th September)
- Patrick McCorry — The Future of Blockchain and Bitcoin (Panelist) — The Future of Blockchain and Bitcoin (21st September)
- Sergi Delgado & Patrick McCorry — Bitcoin Developer Workshop — Fidelity Investments (1–2nd October)
- Patrick McCorry — Accountable Watching Services — Devcon5 (8th — 11th October)
- Sergi Delgado — Towards an accountable, highly available, and fault-tolerant watching service for Bitcoin’s lightning network — The Lightning Conference (19th-20th October)
- Patrick McCorry — PISA: Arbitration Outsourcing for State Channels — Advances in Financial Technologies (21st-23rd October)
