November Newsletter — Broadcasting
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 helped set the foundation for off-chain scalability and now our task is to ensure that crypto, via off-chain, is adopted by billions of users.
🚀 Technical Deep Dives 🚀
We have put together technical deep-dive videos on the evolution of third party broadcasting networks for both Bitcoin & Ethereum:
- A Financially Accountable Third Party Broadcasting Network @ Devcon5 [slides] [video]
- Towards an Accountable, Highly Available, and Fault-Tolerant Watching Service @ The Lightning Conference [slides] [video]
- Thanks to BinanceX for hosting and inviting us to several meetups including at Devcon5 & SFBW.
- As well, Sergi Delgado presented TxProbe at CESC’19 [slides]
🚀 The WatchTower (Bitcoin) 🚀
We are lucky and thankful to have presented at the Lightning Conference of the Year. It really was one of the best conferences we have attended.
Do watch our talk. We covered a bunch of important topics for building watchtowers in Bitcoin:
- Fundamental problems with the on-chain bounty approach for paying watchtowers. (Problems with this incentive model was also pointed out by Thomas Voegtlin from Electrum)
- With PISA, we are building a trust-minimised watchtower via financial and reputational accountability. (Rusty Russell mentioned how receipts are key to keeping the vendor honest, hopefully our work is in line with that vision)
- Why PISA is a boring, technical and tedious project — how the Bitcoin transaction model makes building a watchtower both easy and hard.
- A live demo of hiring a PISA watch tower and watching it respond.
The eco-system around the lightning network is taking off and we are hoping to be the first third party watching service available for hire. Watch this space!
🚀 Relayer & Responder (Ethereum) 🚀

At Devcon5, our goal was to great across a super-clear and simple point:
Our financially accountable relayer and responder is useful for 99% of smart contracts on Ethereum.
Not only off-chain? What? Why? How?
- Relayers are beneficial to users who do not have access to the native currency, but they need to interact with the blockchain. Some great examples include on-boarding new users, multi-signature contracts, mixing contracts, etc.
- Responders are beneficial to users who need to remain online and respond to an event, but they need to go offline (or worse, they crash!). Some great examples include protecting CDPs, responding to auctions, DEX step-loss functionality.
Together, it forms an accountable third party broadcasting network — supporting the execution of most smart contracts.
❓❓PISA was working on off-chain scalability❓❓
Our mission is to build the missing components for an off-chain network as we believe it is the only way crypto will truly achieve internet-scale usage while prioritising self-custody of user funds, but…
Jinglan Wang of Plasma Group posted a great tweet during #CryptoTwitterIRL about the real and immediate problem facing crypto:
“Nobody actually gives a fuck about scale. Usability is the problem, and scaling is only one side of the story.”
The quote is a bit crude, but we agree with her.
What PISA is really solving is the immediate usability problem for on-boarding new users, dealing with the transaction stack (bumping fees, block re-orgs) and completing the execution of protocols for users who wish to go offline.
In a way… our immediate goal is the following:
To make it super easy for developers to relay transactions, watch for on-chain events & respond to on-chain events.
🙌🙌🙌🙌 Upcoming events 🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌
- Patrick McCorry — Off-chain Scalability Panel — Fidelity Labs Meetup in Boston (18th November)
- Patrick McCorry — Public lecture on off-chain scalability — IC3 meetup sponsored by Chainlink in New York (21st November)

