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To our friends and members of the PL community: Though we have much positive to share from the first quarter of 2020, it would be disingenuous if we did not stop to acknowledge that the state of the world is currently and understandably marked by uncertainty, distress, anxiety, and grief. We at Protocol Labs Research are working hard to continue the important task of innovation and move toward a better future, while taking care of ourselves, our families, and our communities as best as we can. We hope and wish the best for you all, your loved ones, and the global community as we face this together.

See what's been happening at Protocol Labs Research...

After the inception of the Resilient Networks Lab in 2019, and the launch of our PL Research website, 2020 has gotten off to a great start in spite of its many challenges. Our first quarter has been marked by four publications, two personnel additions, two ResNetLab sponsored RFPs (with more on the way), and our recently launched COVID-19 Open Innovation Grants program.

Funding Opportunities

COVID-19 Open Innovation Grants

Along with the rest of the world, we are deeply concerned by the current COVID-19 pandemic. In response, we have opened a grant program to fund efforts contributing to improved technical solutions around testing, treatment, mitigation, and prevention of COVID-19 and future epidemics. To date, we have received 62 applications and will profile grant recipients in future blog posts. The application deadline is April 10.

ResNetLab Requests for Proposals

Our Resilient Networks Lab currently has two open RFPs, one addressing Multi-Level DHT Design and Evaluation and another focused on Scalability Bounds of P2P Pub/Sub, with more in the works. These RFPs are intended to address published open problems on routing at scale and pub/sub at scale, respectively.

Featured Project

SourceCred

You may not know that Protocol Labs is a supporter of an open-source governance and sustainability project called SourceCred.

What is SourceCred? How does it work? Check out their awesome website, and read what PL Research's Evan Miyazono has to say about it in his blog post, "SourceCred: an introduction to calculating cred and grain ."

Team Updates

We are happy to welcome our two newest team members, Yiannis Psaras and Sarah Azouvi. After acting as an advisor for ResNetLab, Yiannis has joined Protocol Labs full time as a research scientist. Sarah joins us as the newest research scientist for the Filecoin Research team.

Watch PL Research Scientist Nicolas Gailly's talk on Drand: Distributed, bias resistant, unpredictable and publicly verifiable randomness.

Luca Nizzardo’s thesis wins UPM Extraordinary Award

Luca Nizzardo was a PhD student of the IMDEA Software Institute and his thesis “Cryptographic Techniques for the Security of Cloud and Blockchain Systems,” defended in 2018, was directed by Associate Professor Dario Fiore. Nowadays he works for Protocol Labs helping to build protocols, systems, and tools to improve how the Internet works.

In January, the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) announced the two winners of the Extraordinary Award and Luca’s thesis is one of them. In his thesis, Lucas investigates how to enforce the honest behavior of parties involved in a digital interaction over the Internet, particularly considering two emerging paradigms in this setting: cloud computing and e-commerce. Read more about Luca's thesis here.

Publications

January
DClaims: A Censorship Resistant Web Annotations System using IPFS and Ethereum, João Santos, Nuno Santos, David Dias

Single Secret Leader Election, Dan Boneh, Saba Eskandarian, Lucjan Hanzlik, Nicola Greco

February
Vector Commitment Techniques and Applications to Verifiable Decentralized Storage, Matteo Campanelli, Dario Fiore, Nicola Greco, Dimitris Kolonelos, Luca Nizzardo

March
SoK: Tools for Game Theoretic Models of Security for Cryptocurrencies, Sarah Azouvi, Alexander Hicks

Job Openings

Research Engineer, Resilient Networks Lab
Research Administrator
Research Scientist, Cryptography
Research Scientist, Distributed Systems
Research Scientist, Networking

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