Clearmatics 2018 — A Year In Review
2018 was a productive year for Clearmatics with meaningful progress for both the Utility Settlement Coin (USC) project and the wider Clearmatics company.
Series A
In October, we announced our $12m Series A fundraise. This financing round will enable Clearmatics to continue to hire an exceptional research, product and business cross-functional team. Work continues on existing research areas of confidentiality, decentralised interoperability and efficient and resilient consensus mechanisms, as well as developing a robust and compelling go-to-market strategy, supported by both new and existing investors.
BoE PoC for Supporting DLT Settlement Models
In March 2018, the Bank announced that it was running a Proof of Concept (POC). The purpose was to understand how a renewed RTGS service could be capable of supporting settlement in systems operating on innovative payment technologies, such as those built on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).
Clearmatics took park in this exercise, working closely with the Bank to provide feedback on account structure and whether the renewed RTGS service can provide and consume acceptable forms of cryptographic proofs, both of which were accepted for consideration into the RTGS Renewal Programme.
The outcomes of that work are summarised in a document released by the Bank of England in July 2018. In order for the renewed RTGS system to interoperate with distributed systems, we believe this additional functionality within the renewed RTGS will be an important milestone to avoid the introduction of a single point of failure.
Interoperability
As blockchain and DLT technology has matured there is a clearer need for an integrated ecosystem of blockchains, both in the public space and Enterprise. In 2018, interoperability took centre stage.
Much of the conversation in the public space revolved around the ability to make one-way payments and atomic swaps between different cryptocurrencies in order to bridge the gap between systems, namely Bitcoin and Ethereum, as a primary means for cross-chain exchange. This discussion mirrors existing requirements in the Enterprise space, such as delivery-versus-payment and payment-versus-payment. Clearmatics’ Interoperability team released a platform-agnostic interoperability framework, Ion in 2018.
In the spring, we collaborated with Axoni to successfully demonstrate a derivative contract modelled using their domain specific language, AxLang, and the subsequent cross-chain settlement of the resulting two cash payments using the interoperability protocol, Ion, across currency chains built by Clearmatics designed to provide settlement finality. Prototyping the settlement of payments across different permissioned, Ethereum-compatible ledgers is a significant advancement in the long-term applicability and usability of blockchain technology.
The vision with Ion is to create an open protocol that developers and users alike can leverage to create both bridging mechanisms and use-cases between systems, giving the ecosystem its much-needed cross-system interaction in a flexible way, without an intermediary organisation or token. The Ion framework is just the beginning and 2019 will see improvements to the framework, along with collaboration and a library of contracts to drive widespread use.
Consensus
The focus of the consensus team in 2018 has been to research the feasibility of an algorithm which offers technical finality of transactions on Ethereum-based chains, beginning with the practical-Byzantine-Fault-Tolerance family of mechanisms.
The work has been split between product-market fit, formally verifying algorithms, and implementation. The teams have made solid progress, collaborating with the community.
Privacy
On the privacy side, 2018 was the year we extended our implementation of Mobius, carrying out a benchmark and writing documentation to ease use of this Proof of Concept and help developers familiarise themselves with ways to attack it and defeat its privacy promises. This meant conducting research and development into the use of Trusted Execution Environments for privacy enhancing solutions.
The team has focussed on research on the latest advancements in zero knowledge proofs, which is an area of research supported by both the public space and Enterprise, whereby confidentiality can be achieved without diminishing the integrity of the data.
Network Permissioning
Network permissioning has always been a priority in the Enterprise space and on Ethereum-based chains, we see permissioning parameters as a generalisation of the public Ethereum in as much that the parameters can be curtailed from the widest set of actors being able to perform network functions. We are seeing in the public space that participants will need additional permissions when it comes to traditionally regulated functions such as issuance and redemption of security tokens.
Network permissioning consists of joining and viewing transactions on the network, along with creating and validating transactions on the network. These two functionalities are extremely important in the context of a permissioned blockchain network, where it may be desirable to control participant access. We have therefore developed a number of smart contracts that allow limited blockchain governance, without needing a centralised authority. These smart contracts have defined interfaces that allow users to create their unique governance logic that will best match their business needs, including flexibility to work with multiple user requirements.
Watch this space for more developments in 2019.
Events & Conferences
2018 was an eventful year for Clearmatics.
We believe in the power of getting out and about and meeting with our peers face to face in order to build strong networks and ensure access to ideas, talent and capital.
- In January, Rebekah Mercer presented Mobius, Clearmatics’ ring-signatures smart contract privacy approach at the Stanford BPASE conference. This is essentially a privacy overlay for Ethereum.
- Clearmatics team members also presented our interoperability collaboration with Axoni at Consensus 2018 in May.
- In June, our Product Strategist, Sara Feenan, hosted a panel at Money20/20 Amsterdam as well as partaking in the European Investment Bank’s Blockchain Challenge.
- In September, Clearmatics attended and presented Ion, our generalized interoperability framework at the Wanxiang Blockchain Week in Shanghai.
- Straight from China, our team members flew to New York City to attend the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance Technical Specifications working group meeting. The Clearmatics team was active in establishing the first Enterprise Ethereum standards document.
- In September, we attended the seventh annual #RebootingWebOfTrust workshop on decentralised self-sovereign identity technologies, held in Toronto. The focus of the event was on decentralized identity, including technical models, reputation systems, smart contracts and more.
- In October, several team members made the trip over to San Francisco Blockchain Week. This included Clearmatics’ sponsoring of ETHSF, a 72-hour Ethereum hackathon with over 750 participants.
- We also attended CESC, a conference dedicated to exploring the economic security aspects of blockchain protocols, including game theory, incentive design, mechanism design and market design, along with other topics related to crypto-economics security, and to foster collaborations among researchers and practitioners working on these topics. This was a great way to strengthen ties to academia and help promote blockchain as a serious academic discipline.
- In early November, the spectacular city of Prague played host to Devcon4, the world’s preeminent conference for blockchain developers and entrepreneurs. The Clearmatics team was there and we shared our experiences in some depth via Medium. The atmosphere at Devcon4 felt somewhat different. The hype had calmed, enabling everyone to focus on what really matters — building practical real world applications for blockchain.
Selection of Events and conferences we attended in 2018
- Stanford BPASE
- Consensus 2018
- Money20/20 Amsterdam
- EIB Blockchain Conference
- BFC EU 2018
- Wanxiang Blockchain Week
- EEA Tech Spec NYC
- SF Blockchain Week
- ETHSF
- CESC
- Devcon4
2018 was a productive year for blockchain and for Clearmatics. 2019 promises to be even better. We are currently working on number of exciting developments, so keep your eyes peeled for more news as the year progresses.
Christophe MacIntosh, cmacintosh, Community & Communications Lead, Clearmatics
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