Fantom partners with Research and Development company Sikoba Research

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Fantom Foundation

2 min readJan 11, 2019

Fantom is proud to announce our research and development partnership with Sikoba Research.

Sikoba Research is a European-based research organization focusing on applied research in the areas of cryptography, blockchain and distributed systems. Fantom has been working closely with Sikoba Research for several months, focusing on the following areas (as stated on their official website):

Verifiable Computing and Privacy-Preserving Smart Contracts — We are developing a framework that allows to delegate execution of smart contracts away from the blockchain while keeping proof-of-correct execution on-chain, thereby preserving the fundamental principles of decentralised ledger technology.
Consensus Protocols — We are working on methods to optimise and speed up consensus protocols for consortium blockchains, in particular one-step consensus and self-pruning networks. We are also developing an approach for non-deterministic state machine replication.
Token economics — As the blockchain hype is receding, we need new approaches to how tokens are used on smart contract platforms. We are exploring models in which transaction prices are naturally linked to costs of cloud computing and cloud storage.

They have published several papers on Zero-knowledge proofs, Pairing-based Cryptography, verifiable computing, and Byzantine consensus. Sikoba Research has also started development of the “Isekai” verifiable computation software. The first Isekai module being built parses C programs ‘and outputs the arithmetic and/or boolean circuit representing of the expression equivalent to the input program’.

These research areas are of great interest and benefit to Fantom, and we are looking to implement their findings in future releases of Lachesis and our middleware. For example, verifiable computation could be used to reduce the amount of network computation to validate a given transaction. Instead of all validating nodes having to execute virtual machine instructions, a single virtual machine may execute instructions and output a proof, and that proof can be verified by other nodes. This greatly improves scalability and performance, particularly for complex transactions. In addition, zero-knowledge proofs can help ensure data privacy.

You can find more details here:

Website: http://research.sikoba.com

Isekai — verifiable computation project: https://github.com/sikoba/isekai

December 2018 update: https://medium.com/sikoba-network/sikoba-december-2018-update-3f67a13c2356

November 2018 update: https://medium.com/sikoba-network/sikoba-november-2018-update-2fc90f9abfd6

October 2018: https://medium.com/sikoba-network/sikoba-update-october-2018-8a5fb2087740

More exciting technical developments, new partners and new team members will be announced in this new year,

so follow us!

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