Sikoba November 2018 — Update
After a period of planning, this month has seen us execute a number of the strategies we have spent the last few months developing — mainly our partnership with Manas.Tech.
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This month Alex and Nimisha have been working hard on the sikoba IOU platform product specification and user stories in preparation for the start of development by Manas.Tech.
Manas.Tech will be developing the blockchain infrastructure and mobile app to bring the sikoba vision to life. Due to the combination of its high performance and clarity of code, Crystal Language is a perfect fit for developing the underlying infrastructure for the sikoba IOU platform. The partnership was made possible by Nicolás di Tada, Manas.Tech founder and CEO, who has a longstanding interest in unconventional money systems.
Alex flew to Buenos Aires and spent a productive ten days with the team at Manas.Tech to initiate the project and work on the product roadmap, prototypes and plans for the MVP.
On the research side, Alex continued doing background work on consensus protocols and token economics. We have also made progress on a program to parse C code and transform it into an arithmetic circuit, to be used as a building block of our Verifiable Computation project. The software is being written in Crystal.
Dmitry Khovratovich joined sikoba this month as a cryptography and blockchain advisor. Dmitry will be exploring the “state of the art” in secure computation research and tooling, identifying current developments and potentially interesting research topics to help define Sikoba’s Research Plan for 2019. Dmitry holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Luxembourg, where he is also a security researcher. His achievements include Argon2, winner of the Password Hashing Competition, and Equihash, which is a memory-hard Proof-of-Work used by Zcash and other blockchains. Dmitry is now Principal Cryptographer at Evernym, Inc., where he is working on the cryptographic engine behind the privacy-preserving Sovrin ledger.
Christopher McGarry joined sikoba this month as a Research Assistant. He has spent this month exploring state machines, digital ledgers, smart contracts, number theory, finite fields, cryptography and blockchain. Chris holds a bachelors degree in accounting and mathematics and took a keen interest in cryptography while at university.
Our marketing strategy is now active! Margareta has been sharing a constant flow of news, partnership announcements, articles and these monthly updates through our social media channels. We have chosen to focus our efforts on • twitter • facebook • reddit • linkedin • medium • telegram. Please connect with us through whichever channels you feel most comfortable with!
Next Steps:
Together with Manas.Tech, we are working on the development roadmap for our IOU Platform.
We are preparing our Research Plan for 2019.
We also aim to publish a draft of Dmitry’s “State of the Art in Secure Computation” paper before the end of the year.
