Professor Aggelos Kiayias joins IOHK as Chief Scientist

We are delighted to announce that Professor

Prof Kiayias is the pre-eminent academic in the field of blockchain security. He has produced pioneering work providing the rigorous analysis necessary to secure…

For some of the IOHK team it was their first time meeting in person when we gathered in Latvia this month for an intensive working session to push forward several of our key projects. As a distributed company we usually collaborate remotely, across time zones, so coming together to exchange ideas was inspiring. For two weeks in the beautiful capital city of Riga, we advanced…

A major technical challenge of the cryptocurrencies is to find a way to safely increase the throughput of the system in terms of number of transactions. An approach to tackle this limitation is to review the role of the blockchain, or even to take that data structure out of the picture completely. In this post, we will comment a paper by Boyen, Carr and Haines named Blockchain…

Log-Structured-Merge trees (LSMT) are a good fit for modern SSD storage and offer good performance and reliability. LSMT are also a good fit for blockchain storage requirements (snapshots, consistency, proof of existence). This blog post describes a database designed specifically for blockchain storage, inspired by existing LSMT implementations (RocksDB, COLA tree).

The current state-of-the-art LSMT implementation is probably RocksDB, with in-memory write buffers, parallel compaction and snapshots. Another similar algorithm are COLA tree. That is a btree-like structure where each node has separate write buffer. Finally there is SSTable from Cassandra…

This post tries to give a short overview of provable security in cryptocurrencies.

For example, the paper "New Directions in Cryptography" by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, which is considered by most the beginning of modern cryptography (at least the public and civilian one), does not provide such rigorous analysis.

The publications from the cryptographic research…