It is well known that randomness is a fundamental resource for secure cryptographic schemes. All common encryption and authentication schemes are only as secure as their randomness sources are good. Using a poor randomness source can basically render insecure every cryptographic scheme that would otherwise be secure. In many cases, it is sufficient to have a trustworthy local…

It took a little longer than expected but I finally made the trip to Buenos Aires, Argentina. In fact, I'm standing at a work desk by the window in Frankfurt airport waiting for my flight back to Dublin. I'm enjoying a gloriously sunny day here through the wall of glass. 

It was another productive trip, a lot has happened since the Team Grothendieck trips to Poland and St Petersburg. In our work to build a Scala client for Ethereum Classic there has been a lot of code written, a lot of understanding gained, and a couple of milestones reached: we now have the ability to download and execute blocks of transactions from the ETC chain. We have also evolved a lot as a…

TL;DR You want to avoid the next DAO-like disaster: so you want confidence that the system underpinning your cryptocurrency doesn’t have a hidden flaw that could be triggered at any time and render your assets worthless. To get that confidence you need a high assurance implementation of the system operating your cryptocurrency. Formal methods (mathematical specifications and…

Just who was Daedalus? It was the first of many questions the design team had to answer when we started work to find a logo for the digital wallet that will store the Ada cryptocurrency. Daedalus is an unusual name. We were in Riga, on an IOHK working sprint last autumn, when we got the brief to develop the visual identity and brand for the wallet, so the first thing we did was…

Last Monday should have been particularly jarring given the recent excitement. However, it was anything but. Sunlight was flooding the back garden and all the small birds of the neighborhood came together to perform an impromptu concert at maximum volume. I could hear them clearly through the double glazing. Spring had sprung in Dublin. And I’d just come back from Malta talking…