Inaugural Tendermint Community Update — August 2018
You’re reading the very first monthly update from Tendermint! All Tendermint-related content previously published on the Cosmos Blog has been migrated over to the Tendermint Blog. In the Tendermint publication, you can expect to read about Tendermint’s projects, partnerships, new hires, a curated industry news section, a Tendermint resources section, and more to come.
New Hires
Alessio Treglia — Senior Software Engineering Consultant
Alessio has been involved in FLOSS — especially Linux distribution development for over 10 years. He moved to London over 5 years ago after working as a freelancer and worked in a number of different business areas as developer, devops, architect, and engineering manager. He enjoys being a “jack of all trades”, and recently left Bank of America Merrill Lynch, where he worked as Vice President of Global Markets Operations Technology, to fully enjoy his new journey into blockchain technologies and crypto markets.
Federico Kunze — Software Developer, Voyager
Federico Kunze graduated in Computer Science and Industrial Engineering in Chile. During Fall ’17, he took a semester abroad at UC Berkeley, during which he got into Blockchain at Berkeley as a developer and joined an external consulting team working to build a decentralized license marketplace for Qualcomm. Early this year, Federico co-founded the Chilean blockchain industry association (aka CryptoChile).
Federico joined Tendermint as an intern over the past Spring quarter. Federico has joined us full time now to work on Voyager, the user interface which provides a dashboard into the Cosmos Network.
Khayeni Sanders — Visual Designer
Khayeni Sanders is a NYC-based visual designer specializing in branding and motion design. In the past, she has worked for the City of NYC to brand their Family Welcome Centers and MTV Networks to support their on-air channel networks. Most recently, she has worked to develop brand and marketing design strategy in the tech and security space. She is a graduate of Pratt Institute’s MS Communications Design program. Khayeni joined Tendermint in July as the Lead Visual Designer. View her portfolio.
Announcements
Formalizing Consensus: Tendermint
Critics of Tendermint bring up the fact that it has not been formally peer reviewed. Addressing this, co-authors Zarko Milosevic, Jae Kwon, and Ethan Buchman, Tendermint’s Senior Distributed Systems Researcher, inventor, and co-founder, respectively, published a full specification of Tendermint this past July. The paper will be submitted for peer review at upcoming conferences. The paper is called “The latest gossip on BFT consensus”. Goes well with coffee. Please enjoy.
- The latest gossip on BFT consensus: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.04938
Curated Industry News
- At Tendermint, we’re actively researching how to integrate BLS signatures into the Tendermint protocol. As such, we found this to be a great read. BLS Signatures: better than Schnorr — by Stepan.
- O(1) Labs has been doing excellent work on next generation blockchain scaling technology, so we found their latest paper on Coda to be a good read. Coda: Decentralized cryptocurrency at scale — by Izaak Meckler & Evan Shapiro.
- This is a great paper about the limitations of formal methods. BP: Formal Proofs, the Fine Print and Side Effects — by Toby Murray.
- We tip our hats off to the researchers distributing state-of-the-art zkSNARKs which now enables a new level of performance at 100x the number of computations than previously. DIZK: A Distributed Zero Knowledge Proof System — by Howard Wu et. al.
- We love getting deep in the weeds, and Vitalik’s article hit the spot. STARKs, Part 3: Into the Weeds — by Vitalik Buterin.
- Handshake, a project that seeks to get rid of certificate authorities by creating a decentralized trust anchor — the Handshake blockchain — has launched this month. While it doesn’t directly decentralize DNS, it does replace the DNS root zone with an ICANN/IANA disintermediation vehicle — a magical blockchain that uses an authenticated data structure called — no joke — an Urkel Tree— created by Christopher Jeffrey, Joseph Poon, Andrew Lee, and Private Internet Access.
- Bram Cohen’s BLS library for doing non-interactive aggregated signatures was released recently— via Bitcoin Dev Mailing List.
Resources
- Zero Knowledge Podcast Ep. 35: Testnets with Ethan Buchman.
- Software Engineering Daily podcast: The History of Distributed State with Ethan Buchman.
- The Bitcoin Podcast Network: Hashing It Out Ep. #5 with Zaki Manian.
- Interview about Tendermint consensus with Tendermint Senior Research Scientist, Zarko Milosevic: here.
- Tendermint RPC Documentation: https://tendermint.github.io/slate/
