The RChain Cooperative & Pyrofex Corporation ink Strategic Partnership
24 January 2018 — The RChain Cooperative and Pyrofex Corporation announced strategically important service contracts and an equity investment intended to deliver several mutually beneficial blockchain solutions.
Background
Greg Meredith (RChain Co-op president and Chief Architect) and Dr. Mike Stay (Pyrofex Co-founder) are long-time colleagues and collaborators whose mutual research efforts form the mathematical foundations of RChain’s technology. These foundations are a key differentiation of RChain compared to other distributed computing solutions. To learn more about the technology and rho-calculus underpinnings see these examples.
Another example of the work that Greg and Dr. Stay have collaborated on is the work on the LADL (Logic as Distributed Law) algorithm. You can watch Dr. Stay present the latest research from the RChain Developers retreat.
Early in the year, while RChain was newly formed and undergoing the typical(and not so typical) growing pains of a tech startup, Dr. Stay and Pyrofex Co-founder Nash Foster demonstrated their faith in the platform and the organizations commitment to cooperative governance by tapping their deep networks to form the early RChain core dev team.
Pyrofex and the development team should be familiar to those who follow the RChain Cooperative. CEO Nash Foster and Lead Project Manager Medha Parlikar have helped grow RChain’s development team to an impressive 20+ Core devs with plans on doubling by mid 2018. The team now includes multiple PhDs, ex-Googlers, along with other word class talents.
Every Wednesday, you will find Medha on our debrief updating the community with the latest developments in RChain. Subscribe to the youtube channel to stay updated and ask questions directly to the team, who is devoted to developing a transparent and inclusive platform cooperative.
The working relationship between the RChain Cooperative and Pyrofex has gone so well that the Board of Directors and the community have supported Pyrofex’s proposal to develop Cryptofex, the much needed developer tool kit for the decentralized world.
“As we rocket towards Mercury and beyond, we could use better tools. “
— The RChain Co-op Team.
Listen to the announcement from Greg Meredith as well as a short Q&A with Pyrofex CEO Nash Foster, from a recent community debrief.
The following is an excerpt from the soon to be released Cryptofex Whitepaper.
The Problem: Writing Software is Hard, Compiling is Harder
In 1983, Bordland Software Corporation acquired a small compiler called Compas Pascal and released it in the United States as Turbo Pascal. It was the first product to integrate a compiler and the editor in which software was written and for nearly a decade Borland’s products defined the market for integrated development environments (IDEs).
The year after Borland released TurboPascal, Ken Thompson observed the distinct and unique dangers associated with compiler technologies. In his famous Turing Award acceptance speech, Thompson described a mechanism by which a virus can be injected into a compiler such that every binary compiled with that compiler will replicate the virus.
“In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.” — Ken Thompson
Unfortunately, many developers today remain stuck in a world constructed in the early 1980’s. IDEs remain essentially the same, able to solve only those problems that neatly fit onto their laptop’s single Intel CPU. But barely a month ago, on 22nd November 2017, the Intel Corporation released a critical firmware update to the Intel Management Engine and in the intervening weeks, the public at large has become aware of the “Meltdown” bug. The IME and other components are exactly the sort of low-level microcode applications that Thompson warned about. Intel has demonstrated perfectly that in the past 33 years, we have learned little and gone nowhere.
Ironically, we have had a partial solution to these problems for nearly a decade. In 2009, David A. Wheeler published his PhD dissertation, in which he proposed a mechanism by which multiple compilers can be used to verify the correctness of a compiler output. Such a mechanism turns out to be tailor-made for the decentralized blockchain environment. Combining Wheeler’s mechanism with a set of economic incentives for compile farms to submit correct outputs gives us a very real shot at correcting a problem that has plagued us for more than 30 years.
The Solution: A Distributed and Decentralized Toolchain
If we crack open the development environments at companies like Google and Amazon, many of us would be surprised to discover that very few programs are compiled on a single machine. Already, the most sophisticated organizations in the world have moved to a distributed development environment. This allows them to leverage the cloud, bringing high-performance distributed computing to bear on software development itself. At Google, many thousands of machines churn away compiling code, checking it for correctness, and storing objects to be re-used later. Through clever use of caching and “hermetic” builds, Google makes its builds faster and more computationally efficient than could possibly be done on individual developer workstations. Unfortunately, most of us cannot afford to dedicate thousands of machines to compilation.
The open-source community might be able to build large scale shared compilation environments on the Internet, but Ken Thompson explained to us why we could not trust a shared environment for these workloads. However, in the age of blockchain, it’s now possible to build development environments that harness the power of large-scale compute to compile and check programs against programmer intent. Secure, cheap, and fast — we can get all three.
CryptoFex is just such a Decentralized Integrated Development Environment (DIDE) allowing software engineers to author, test, compile, and statically check their code to ensure that it is secure, efficient, and scalable.
Outline of Terms
- Private Placement of Equity Securities — The RChain Cooperative will acquire $2M worth of Pyrofex common stock and a board seat at $1.75/share.
- Software Development and Conference Support Services — Pyrofex will receive a renewal of its core development contract for the next 2 years as well as a contract to provide conference support services over the next 5 years. In consideration, Pyrofex will transfer to the RChain Cooperative $5M worth of Spark tokens, which will convert into PYRO tokens during the launch of Cryptofex.
- Cryptofex Software Development Tools — Pyrofex will also develop a suite of software development tools for the RChain platform, called the Cryptofex DIDE, which will allow developers to create smart contracts optimized for the RChain platform and able to take advantage of RChain’s specific features. In consideration, RChain will transfer $5M worth of RHOC to Pyrofex.
Roadmap Sketch
Pyrofex has proposed the following high-level roadmap, subject to revision as the project progresses.
2018–1.0 Core tools:
- Cryptofex Maker — A Blockchain IDE based on Eclipse.
- Cryptofex MakerStore — A Blockchain “App Store” monetized through the PYRO
- Cryptofex ToolKit — A collection of OSS command-line dev tools.
2019–2.0 Additions:
- Crytpofex Build APIs — Integrated Build Tools
- Cryptofex Verifiers — Integrated Program Verification Tools
2020–3.0 Additions:
- Cryptofex Base Language
- Cryptofex Secure Compiler
Comments on the News
“We’re thrilled to have an opportunity to strengthen our relationship with the RChain Cooperative in 2018. Their commitment to open-source development mirrors our own corporate values. It’s a pleasure to have such a close relationship with a vibrant open-source community. I’ve rarely seen the kind of excitement the Coop’s members share and we look forward to delivering some great new technology this year.” — Nash E. Foster, Cofounder & CEO, Pyrofex Corp.
“Intuitive development tools are important for us and the blockchain ecosystem as a whole; we’re incredibly glad Pyrofex intends to launch their tools on RChain first. But, Ethereum has been a huge supporter of RChain and we’re pleased that Pyrofex intends to support Solidity developers as well. Having tools that will make it possible for developers to migrate smart contracts between blockchains is going to create tremendous possibilities.”
— Lucius Greg Meredith, President, RChain Cooperative
Watch the latest interview with two major players in the development of the RChain ecosystem, Lawerence Lerner(CEO of RChain Holdings) and Nash Foster(CEO of Pyrofex Corp.)
For more information on RChain visit rchain.coop.
Contacts
Inquires for rchain may be sent to info@rchain.coop
Inquiries for Pyrofex may be sent to press@pyrofex.net.
