I am excited for the European Blockchain Convention that is scheduled to happen next month, in September. I am particularly interested  in this conference because it mainly deals with Blockchain for Business. I think Business' are going to be key drivers of Blockchain to the masses.

Some interesting panel topics that caught my attention are :

Transforming digital identity into Self Sovereign Identity
Notabene and Concordium are two projects I am closely watching. I look forward to the talk by CEO of Concordium, Lone Fønss Schrøder and the CEO of Notabene Pelle Braendgaard. Concordium mainly because they are building regulatory compliant Blockchain for Business. Notabene has been vocal about Travel Rule. Regulation will surely be a key decision maker in adoption of crypto in 2021.   

I also am interested in the following panels :

• Where Do We Stand on Self-Sovereign Identity?
  
• Blockchain: Regulation and the Law in 2020.
  
  • Central Bank Digital Currencies and the Future of Money.

In the wake of GDPR and other privacy laws, companies need ways to process data in a way such that the trust is distributed among several parties. This is super important for preservationof privacy as well as being compliant with the laws.

Topology-Hiding Computation (THC) allows a set of parties to securely compute a function over an incomplete network without revealing information on the network topology. Since its introduction in TCC’15 by Moran et al., the research on THC has focused on reducing the communication complexity, allowing larger graph classes, and tolerating stronger corruption types.

All of these results consider a fully synchronous model with a known upper bound on the maximal delay of all communication channels.

Unfortunately, in any realistic setting this bound has to be extremely large, which makes all fully synchronous protocols inefficient.  In the literature on multi- party computation, this is solved by considering the fully asynchronous model.

However, THC is unachievable in this model (and even hard to define), leaving even the definition of a meaningful model as an open problem.

Researchers from Concordium, MIT, IDC Herzilya and ETH Zurich introduce a meaningful model of unknown and random communication delays for which THC is both definable and achievable.

The probability distributions of the delays can be arbitrary for each channel, but one needs to make the (necessary) assumption that the delays are independent.

The existing fully-synchronous THC protocols do not work in this setting and would, in particular, leak information about the topology.

Second, in the model with trusted stateless hardware boxes introduced at Eurocrypt’18 by Ball et al., the researchers present a THC protocol that works for any graph class.

Third, they explore what is achievable in the standard model without trusted hardware and present a THC protocol for specific graph types (cycles and trees) secure under the DDH assumption.

The speed of all protocols scales with the actual (unknown) delay times, in contrast to all previously known THC protocols whose speed is determined by the assumed upper bound on the network delay.

A fundamental solution to this problem is to introduce a meaningful model to secure multiparty computation.

There was a Blockchain Research Center at Aarhus University that was opened up on 1st February 2019. The center has been researching into blockchain technology, with focus on security, transparency and general usability.

According to Professor Jesper Buus Nielsen, who is heading the Concordium Blockchain Research Center at Aarhus University ( COBRA ) their goal is to gather experience from previous generations of blockchains, compare that with the research they have conducted there at the department over the decade, and on the basis of that comparison forge new knowledge about the technology.

Blockchain technology is considered as one of the most important technological discoveries in recent times. The technology is expected to revolutionize foreign exchange systems, strengthen copyrights and digitalize electoral systems. So far, however, the technology has had a slightly tarnished reputation due to problems with security, transparency and usability, among other things. A new research center at the Department of Computer Science at Aarhus University will now try to solve these problems.

The center will be a strong part of Aarhus University's comprehensive digitalization initiatives and, together with the Centre for Digitalization, Big Data and Data Analytics (DIGIT), which they established in 2017, it will give Danish IT research and education an important boost says the dean at Science and Technology, Niels Christian Nielsen.

In Aarhus they are world champions in cryptography. It is no coincidence that the research center is located at Aarhus University. The researchers at the Department of Computer Science are some of the best in the world within research areas of cryptography and verification, which are central to developing the blockchain technology.

"With an investment of this scale in Aarhus University's world-class computer scientists, Denmark is at the forefront of digitization providing companies and researchers a solid foundation for taking full advantage of the opportunities new technologies present," says Anders Samuelsen, Denmark's Minister for Foreign Affairs.

Funded by the Concordium Foundation :

The research center is being funded by the Concordium Foundation, established non-profit foundation, that is developing the Concordium Blockchain Network: a new-generation blockchain, with focus on user identification and transparency. The foundation is supporting the centre with just over DKK 10 million (EUR 1.3 million) a year over the first five years of the centre's lifetime.

"The Concordium Foundation has granted the Concordium Blockchain Research Center Aarhus DKK 50 million (EUR 6.7 million) over the next five years to fund non-targeted research into the technology. Our hope is that, in the long term, the research can help both the private sector and the public authorities to use blockchain technology securely and effectively for different types of transactions," says Lars Seier Christensen, chairman of the Concordium Foundation.

Concordium Blockchain Research Center Aarhus will be located at Department of Computer Science at Aarhus University with Professor Jesper Buus Nielsen as center leader. All results from the centers research will be made publicly available via open access. More information about the center can be found here.

I have been following some research work from Cobra for a few months now and I must say it is a class apart. Look forward to the mainnet launch of the final Blockchian.

It's no surprising news that Blockchain holds potential implications for global commerce. It could make trade more efficient by removing the manual and paper-based processes and introducing streamlined and automated ones. A public blockchain can be a great collaborative tool because it’s decentralized, and no single entity can own it.

That’s why blockchain is more than just the underlying technology for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum.

We also have been seeing over the past few years that Banks are heavily investing in Blockchain and exploring the distributed ledger technology.

What seemed like a thing of scifi-movies is now turning out to be a reality. We are not far off from seeing Banks fully evolve so that they catch up with technologies such as Bitcoin and others. Just like there is no escaping the system, there is no escaping the new reality of digital money. If banks don't play catch up they need to perish and Banks have realized them quite early ( I still think banks have some time left to survive).

Some popular Banks exploring blockchain :

1. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC)

2. Agricultural Bank of China Limited

3. ALFA Bank from Russia

4. Yes Bank from India

5. UOB (United Overseas Bank) from Singapore

6. CommonWealth Bank from Australia

7. LatiPay from New Zealand

8. Kotak Bank

9. RAK Bank

10. The Federal Bank from India

It is indeed interesting that so many banks have been exploring blockchain or distributed ledger technology. In the process of exploring this revolutionary technology banks have realized that there is no use in re inventing the wheel. Many have realized that there is no point in closed permissioned blockchains. To harness the true power of Blockchain they need public blockchain. But, as we all know Banks deal with financial details and instruments that may require privacy and everything cannot be public.

Another problem with public ledgers is the factor of accountability and anonymity, because Banks need to follow certain,strict guidelines.

I think by providing onchain-ID verification and regulatory compliance provided by Blockchain protocols such as Concordium at a base protocol layer, it would become easier for blockchain enterprise adoption and help Banks make the shift to Public blockchains. Concordium claims to the worlds first public blockchain to have regulatory compliance and on-chain ID verification.

They are designing a 2-Layer Consensus Mechanism that combines a Nakamoto-style Blockchain with an innovative finalization for fast transactions and secure finality under adverse conditions.Concordium includes an identity layer at the protocol level and a ZK Proof Based mechanism to ensure a high level of privacy ( Banks would love privacy since it is very essential for them to operate )  and regulatory compliance at the same time.

Banks want privacy not anonymity. I wont be too surprised if many Banks switch over to Concordium as a choice of their Public Blockchain to leverage public blockchain but also uphold privacy and their standard business practices.

The world is changing so should the banks.

We all know that in proof-of-work based cryptocurrencies, miners invest computing power to maintain a distributed ledger.

The drawback of such a consensus protocol is its immense energy consumption. Bitcoin, for example consumes as much energy as a small nation state and we are all aware of that.

To prevent this waste of energy various consensus mechanism such as proof-of-space or proof-of-stake have been proposed.

In proof-of-stake, block creators are selected based on the amounts of money they stake instead of their expanded computing power.

Virtual ASICs are essentially a virtualized version of proof-of-work. Miners can buy on-chain virtual mining machines which can be powered by virtual electricity.

Similar to their physical counterparts, each powered virtual ASIC has a certain chance to win the right to create the next block. In the boundary case where virtual electricity is free, the protocol corresponds to proof-of-stake using an ASIC token which is separate from the currency itself (the amount of stake equals your virtual computing power).

In the other boundary case where virtual computers are free, we get a proof-of-burn equivalent.

That is, a consensus mechanism in which miners ‘burn’ money to obtain lottery tickets for the right to create the next block.

The researchers at Concordium provide the cryptographic machinery required to base a consensus protocol on Virtual ASICs, as well as to sell them in sealed-bid auctions on-chain.

They ensure that as long as a majority of the miners in the system mine honestly, bids remain both private and binding, and that miners cannot censor the bids of their competitors.

To achieve this, the authors introduce a novel all-or-nothing broadcast functionality in blockchains that is of independent interest.

Here is a video where they explain this concept in detail : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR7IxjgXeQ4&feature=emb_logo

What do you think of Virtual ASIC and Proof of Work Mechanisms as compared to Proof of Work?

Consider the following seemingly paradoxical question :

Can Peggy convince Vic of the veracity of an NP statement, without leaking any information about the witness even in case Vic is malicious and Peggy does not trust her computer?
Can we avoid that Peggy fools Vic into accepting false statements, even if Peggy is mali- cious and Vic does not trust her computer?

At EUROCRYPT 2015, Mironov and Stephens-Davidowitz introduced cryptographic reverse firewalls (RFs) as an attractive approach to tackling such questions.

Study interactive proof systems (IPSes) in a strong adversarial setting where the machines of honest parties might be corrupted and under control of the adversary. Their aim is mainly to answer the seemingly paradoxical questions like above.

Intuitively, a Reverse Firewall for Peggy/Vic is an external party that sits between Peggy/Vic and the outside world and whose scope is to sanitize Peggy’s/Vic’s incoming and outgoing messages in the face of subversion of her/his computer, e.g. in order to destroy subliminal channels.

The researchers at Concordium, Chaya Ganesh , Bernardo Margi , Daniele Venturi put forward several natural security properties for RFs in the concrete setting of IPSes.

As their main contribution, they construct efficient RFs for different IPSes derived from a large class of Sigma protocols that they call malleable.

A nice feature of their design is that it is completely transparent, in the sense that their RFs can be directly applied to already deployed IPSes, without the need to re-implement them.

It can get quite technical unless you are actually have prior knowledge about subversion, Cryptographic Firewalls , Zero knowledge Proofs to fully understand this in depth.

They finally conclude the research by showing how to design cryptographic reverse firewalls allowing to preserve security of interactive proof systems in the face of subversion. Their firewalls apply to a large class of Sigma protocols meeting a natural malleability property, and can be extended to cover classical applications of Sigma protocols for designing zero-knowledge proofs and for proving compound statements.

I found a research paper that basically speaks about creating the simplest multi-key linearly Homomorphic signature scheme. In it they mainly consider the problem of outsourcing computation on data authenticated by different users.

With that they aim to create the simplest possible solution to provide data integrity in cloud-based scenarios. Concretely, their multi-key linearly homomorphic signature scheme (mklhs) allows users to upload signed data on a server, and at any later point in time any third party can query the server to compute a linear combination of data authenticated by different users and check the correctness of the returned result.

Their construction generalizes Boneh et al.’s linearly homomorphic signature scheme to the multi-key setting and relies on basic tools of pairing-based cryptography. Compared to existing multi-key homomorphic signature schemes, they claim their mklhs is a conceptually simple and elegant direct construction, which trades-off privacy for efficiency.

They claim that the simplicity of their approach leads them to a very efficient construction that enjoys significantly shorter signatures and higher performance than previous proposals.

Finally, they move onto implement mklhs using two different pairing-friendly curves at the 128-bit security level, a Barreto-Lynn-Scott curve and a Barreto-Naehrig curve.

Their benchmarks illustrate interesting performance trade-offs between these parameters, involving the cost of exponentiation and hashing in pairing groups.

Interestingly the author of this research also happens to be working in the Science Team of Conocrdium which has funded the ongoing research of Aarhus University. Is this a great break through in the field of Cryptographic Engineering and Network Security field. Can more protocols leverage such signature schemes?

No doubt DeFi is the future it will fuel the Decentralized Exchange liquidity too.

The person above posted the link it's exactly that what I'm referring to. I am trying to get a better understanding as well. Would love it f someone experienced and technical can probably share some knowledge on this. I am not looking to provide any service hence, I did not post it in the Service Discussion. I am just trying to pick brain about this research and would like to understand from smart folks who might know better than me and enlighten me.

Yes correct! This is exactly what I am referring to.

Bas Spitters and Danil Annenkov of Concordium have proposed a novel way of embedding functional smart contract languages into the Coq proof assistant using meta-programming techniques.

Their framework allows for developing the meta-theory of smart contract languages using the deep embedding and provides a convenient way for reasoning about concrete contracts using the shallow embedding. They mainly propose an approach that allows to make a connection between the two embeddings in a form of a soundness theorem.

As an instance of their approach they develop an embedding of the Oak smart contract language in Coq and verify several important properties of a crowdfunding contract.

They claim that they have developed techniques that are applicable to all functional smart contract languages thorough this.

I know that this can be a technically heavy subject.But wondering if any researchers or any other blockchain projects have gone down this route?

As the industry matures and more institutional money pours in we are seeing many old projects and many new projects emerge winners from a market perspective.How much of it is actually fueled by actual utility? Or is it mere market speculation?

I see many new projects that are innovating. Science Backed Blockchain Concordium plans to release GTU ( Global Transaction Unit ). The Graph plans to release its own Graph Tokens. Many Web 3 projects are releasing their own tokens that will utilize substrate.

Post Defi Wave how will these tokens probably do? Will it lead to the new waveof Bull run as more new projects which are heavily researched and hve working products take over the blockchain markets by storm?

What are your thoughts on the need for regulation in the cryptocurrency industry? As the industry matures, I think it would make sense to go the regulatory route rather than to fight the "existing system"?

I think Concordium clearly understands the need for Privacy. I like how this project clearly separates between privacy and anonymity. The founder of Concordium is the founder of Saxo Bank. It made sense when he mentions in his video that he's seen trends like the internet grow when no one believed him and the way it matured over time.He thinks something very similar is going to happen in blockchain as well.

According to him Banks and Financial institutions ( he has more than 20 years of experience being CEO of a bank he co founded ) need identity verification and anonymity will not be possible but privacy sure can be possible and Concordium addresses this very point.

It made sense to me. What are your thoughts?

Concordium is innovative in its approach to the fundamental challenges of all public blockchains from network security to smart contracts. But the two central innovations are the tight integration with regulatory requirements and the new 2-layer consensus protocol.

Concordium blockchain enables provably private transactions, while providing means to de-anonymise actors with suspicious behaviour. The latter being done under strict regulatory control.

Their new consensus protocol combines the traditional longest-chain-rule with a Byzantine Agreement Protocol. The former allows very fast addition of new blocks and the latter ensures that new blocks are quickly protected against roll-back.

This combination allows for obtaining a measure of the network conditions and based on this measure the blockchain can be dynamically optimised for security and performance.

They exploit the strong consensus mechanism to provide “Finality as a Service” supporting cross-chain interoperability and enabling sharding.

Existing Nakamoto-style blockchains (NSBs) rely on some sort of synchrony assumption to offer any type of safety guarantees.

A basic requirement is that when a party produces a new block, then all previously produced blocks should be known to that party, as otherwise the new block might not append the current head of the chain, creating a fork. In practice, however, the network delay for parties to receive messages is not a known constant, but rather varies over time.

The consequence is that the parameters of the blockchain need to be set such that the time between the generation of two blocks is typically larger than the network delay (e.g., 10 minutes in Bitcoin) to guarantee security even under bad network conditions.

This results in lost efficiency for two reasons:
(1) Since blocks are produced less often, there is low throughput. 
(2) blocks can only be considered final, and thus the transactions inside confirmed, once they are extended by sufficiently many other blocks, which incurs a waiting time that is a multiple of 10 minutes.

This is true even if the actual network delay is only 1 second, meaning that NSBs are slow even under good network conditions.

Concordium Researchers at Aarhus Research Center at Aarhus University show how the Bitcoin protocol can be adjusted such that they preserve Bitcoin’s security guarantees in the worst case, and in addition, their protocol can produce blocks arbitrarily fast and achieve optimistic responsiveness.

The latter means that in periods without corruption, the confirmation time only depends on the (unknown) actual network delay instead of the known upper bound.

Technically, they propose an approach where blocks are treated differently in the “longest chain rule”.

The crucial parameter of their protocol is a weight function assigning different weight to blocks according to their hash value.

They even present a framework for analyzing different weight functions, in which they prove all statements at the appropriate level of abstraction.

This allows them to quickly derive protocol guarantees for different weight functions. They even exemplify the usefulness of theirr framework by capturing the classical Bitcoin protocol as well as exponentially growing functions as special cases, where the latter provide the above mentioned guarantees, including optimistic responsiveness.

Concordiumhttps://concordium.com/计划引入一个创新的身份层，该层允许用户在链外创建可验证的身份以促进对相关法规的遵守，同时还允许以保护用户隐私的方式在链上表示该身份。

过去，用户隐私和责任制之间通常存在极端的平衡。一些区块链允许完全匿名的交易而无需任何责任，使其容易受到非法活动的攻击。同样令人不安的是，尽管某些区块链并未为交易提供真正的匿名性，无法跟踪交易和账户，但它们并没有提供系统的方式来发现可疑用户的真实身份。

Concordium声称通过为用户提供交易隐私以及允许对当地法规负责的机制来提供可行的解决方案。

这意味着在处理交易时不会暴露发送者或接收者的身份，如果交易是加密传输，则发送者或接收者也将是唯一可以看到实际交易金额的各方。另一方面，在检测到可疑交易或一组交易的情况下，可以借助匿名吊销者和身份提供者将用户的真实身份透露给合格的机构。

此外，如果怀疑某个特定的真实世界身份具有恶意行为，则匿名吊销者和身份提供者可以帮助跟踪该用户的所有帐户。

我认为这将有助于法规嵌入协议设计中。尽管这对于许多人来说似乎很可怕，但实际上它是安全的，因为我们知道确切地跟踪了什么而没有跟踪什么。这样一来，政府侦听的空间就大大减少了，恶意行为者在这里的杠杆作用也将减少，用户将受到黑客和其他不良行为者的保护。

反过来，这将鼓励更多的企业采用公共的，未经许可的区块链，因为这样可以更容易地保护自己免受不良行为者的侵害，仍然向听众负责，同时将任何重要的敏感业务组件保持私有状态，而大多数他们实际上并不需要担心合规性。

这将真正帮助安全性加速开放式区块链环境，并保证企业偏爱的许可封闭环境。

Concordium plans to introduce an innovative identity layer that allows users to create a verifiable identity off-chain to facilitate compliance with relevant regulations, while also allowing that identity to be represented on-chain in a way that protects the user’s privacy.

In the past there has usually been an extreme balances between user privacy and accountability. Some blockchains allow fully anonymous transactions without any accountability, making them vulnerable to illegal activity. Equally troubling is that while some blockchains do not provide true anonymity for transactions, allowing for transactions and accounts to be tracked, they offer no systematic way to discover the real-world identity of suspicious users.

Concordium claims to offer a workable solution by providing transactional privacy for users, along with a mechanism that allows accountability to local regulations.

This means that transactions are processed without exposing the identity of the sender or receiver, who will also be the only parties that can see the actual amount of a transaction, if the transaction is an encrypted transfer. On the other hand, where a suspicious transaction or set of transactions have been detected, the real-world identity of the user can be revealed to qualified authorities with the help of anonymity revokers and identity providers.

Moreover, if a specific real-world identity is suspected of malicious behavior, anonymity revokers and identity providers can help trace all accounts of that user.

I think this will help regulation get embedded within the protocol design. Though this might seem scary to many, it actually is safe because we know what exactly is being tracked and what is not. So that leaves very less scope for snooping by governments, malicious actors will have less leverage here and users will be protected from hackers and other bad actors.

This will in turn encourage more business to adopt public permissionless blockchains because it would be easier to shield themselves against bad actors, still provide accountability to their audience, while keeping any essential sensitive business components private and most of all they don't really have to worry about regulatory compliance.

This will truly help accelerate open blockchain environments with security and guarantees of permissioned closed environments that business' prefer.

Some of the Obtained guarantees of Concordium as proven by Dinsdale-Young et al. [DMMNT19], we obtain the following guarantees from Concordium's finality layer:

• Chain-Forming: that finalized blocks form a chain;

• Agreement: that all parties agree on the finalized blocks;

• Updated: that the last finalized block does not fall too far behind the last block in the underlying blockchain;

• ⅓-Support: that all finalized blocks are ‘supported’ by honest parties holding at least ⅓ of the total stake.This means that honest parties had these blocks on their chains before finalization and they are not required to adopt a new chain after finalization, limiting potential rollbacks.

To further ensure the reliability of Concordium platform their researchers are investigating formal verification methods to formally prove the security of their finality layer [DSTT19].

Los invitados al podcast son pioneros en las criptomonedas en sus respectivos países y a nivel mundial. Tienen más de 6 años trabajando en la industria y han tenido la posibilidad de trabajar juntos en empresas y en ConsenSys. Los invitados no son más que Pelle Braendgaard y Andres Junge, cofundadores de Notabene, un servicio para que las empresas de cifrado cumplan con las regulaciones de la "Regla de viaje".

En la conversación, hablan principalmente de VASP, que son los proveedores de servicios de activos virtuales o las compañías que ofrecen servicios de activos virtuales, recuerden esta definición porque vamos a nombrarla repetidamente.

También cubre qué es Notabene.id y cuáles son las próximas tendencias en el mundo criptográfico. ¿Qué es un VASP: proveedor de servicios de activos virtuales? Detalles sobre lo que pide la "Regla de viaje";

Qué protocolos se utilizan para transferir la información; Cómo impactará los intercambios de cifrado; ¿Qué están haciendo los bancos? impactará a LATAM en el próximo año El impacto de COVID-19 en la implementación de la regulación Blockchain Concordium, que es la primera cadena de bloques que cumple con las regulaciones y mucho más.

El enlace al podcast es: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2on91WZQe4TnJTb7NZw5zP

Anders Fogh Rasmussen has been at the centre of global and European politics, as the former Prime Minister of Denmark, Danish Minister of Economic Affairs and NATO Secretary General. When Denmark held the Presidency of the European Union he concluded 10 candidate negotiations for accession to EU membership.

Anders now runs, Rasmussen Global, and is non-staff adviser to Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko.

Since 2019 Anders is Strategic Advisor at Concordium, the world’s first identity-validating, regulatory compliant blockchain network.

Yes, that's right, you read that right. Anders is vocal about Blockchain Technology and no doubt he's an advisor for Concordium which is building Identity validating regulatory compliant blockchain that can make it possible for Business' to finally build on top of Public Permissionless Blockchain with ease.