Tech and Research Update: September

The Web3 Foundation nurtures and stewards technologies and applications in the fields of decentralized web software protocols. One way the foundation does this through its Research and Technical teams. We’ve collected the most recent updates from all members of the team so you can know what we’ve been up to!

Research

• New team members!
• Ximin is joining us next week to work on Polkadot’s networking.
• Fabio joined our this month team to help Syed with writing Polkadot specifications.
• Handan gave a talk about BABE block production scheme, and Alistair and Jeff gave a joint talk about our availability and validity scheme, at the Web3 Summit in Berlin, Germany.
• Alistair’s poster paper on GRANDPA was accepted at ACM CCS and will be presented in November at CCS’19 London, UK.
• Alistair co-judged a Substrate hackathon with roughly 200 developers in Hangzhou, China.
• Alistair gave a number of talks in Shanghai, Beijing, and Hangzhou China about Web3 Foundation’s NPoS solution.
• Jeff participated the the Isogeny-Based Cryptography Workshop at the University of Birmingham to advance work on our preferred VDF construction and the CSIDH key exchange for mix-nets.
• Web3 Foundation’s research website added information about team members, as well as, a news box with the latest news and events.
• The research team has started to write a Polkadot overview paper — stay tuned.
• Most of the research team attended Swiss Crypto Day.

Technical Education

• Bill and Logan spoke about Kusama governance and validation at DOTCon in Berlin, Germany.
• Bill and Parity Technologies Joe Petrowski gave a Kusama AMA with staking.network on Aug 29th.
• Logan gave a workshop at King’s College London on the Web3 Foundation, Rust, and Substrate, 21–23 Sep.
• Bill gave a presentation on Kusama in Pittsburgh and online, 26 Sep.

The new wiki is live! Besides updating the look, we have integrated it with Crowdin to allow us to easily crowdsource translations.