Sikoba December 2018 — Update
2018 has been a year of growth for the sikoba project. With Manas.Tech we found an ideal technology partner for developing the sikoba platform. Our research partnership with Fantom Foundation resulted in launching our research division, Sikoba Research. Several papers have been published so far, and we have started development of our Isekai verifiable computation project. Our team has grown significantly and HuffPostUK has put us on their list of Rebel Movements Who Want To Change How Money Works!
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The Manas.Tech team have spent December working through the spike phase of development, making steady progress towards the MVP. They have been exploring how clearing, fees and credit conversion will be modelled within the system. The main challenge in this endeavour is to bridge the complexity that powers trust-based economic models to a simple and usable user experience.
This month we have formally launched Sikoba Research in collaboration with Fantom Foundation.
Sikoba Research’s purpose is to conduct fundamental and applied research in the areas of cryptography, blockchain and distributed systems. The goal is not just to write academic papers and file patents, but also to develop software, produce didactic material and participate in setting blockchain standards.
Our topics of interest include:
- Verifiable Computing and Privacy-Preserving Smart Contracts — We are developing a framework that allows delegation of the 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 for how tokens are used on smart contract platforms. We are exploring models in which transaction prices are naturally linked to the costs of cloud computing and cloud storage.
Through 2018 the team at Sikoba Research have written 5 papers:
- A Primer on NIZK Proofs for Secure Computation - Stéphane Vincent
- Exploring Pairing-Based Cryptography - Stéphane Vincent
- State of the Art in Verifiable Computation - Dmitry Khovratovich
- Verifiable Databases - Dmitry Khovratovich
- One-Step Consensus in Weakly Byzantine Environments - Aleksander Kampa
Our verifiable computation software project is called Isekai. The first module that is being developed parses C programs and outputs the arithmetic and/or boolean circuit representing of the expression equivalent to the input program. Isekai uses libclang to parse the C program, so most of the preprocessor (including the includes) is available. Isekai is written using the Crystal programming language allowing for strong type safety and is compiled to a native executable, ensuring maximum efficiency in parsing.
Development of Isekai has been lead by Nemanja Borić, a computer and electrical engineer from Serbia. Nemanja’s main interests are in system programming, electronics and programming languages and their implementation.
More information can be found at the Sikoba Research website and the Isekai github repository.
Next Steps:
At the beginning of January, the Sikoba Research team will be moving into new offices at LHoFT (Luxembourg House of Financial Technology), one of Luxembourg’s best known incubators.
Throughout January, we will continue to work with Manas.Tech on the sikoba MVP, and also on our research plan for the coming year.
