Co-founder @NearProtocol, a sharded blockchain with an emphasis on usability.
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May 12, 2021 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
1/ We are close to building Blockchain apps that non-technical people can comfortably use.
One year ago I was giving a talk about the importance of UX in blockchain applications. Today there's an app on NEAR that has hundreds of non-technical users.
2/ The particular application in question is nearcrowd.com. It is a crowdsourcing platform on which people can earn NEAR by helping label a dataset for machine learning research.
It is not using blockchain just for payments, it is entirely a blockchain application.
Aug 19, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
1/ An explainer from @mzavershynskyi on how the bi-directional bridge between NEAR and Ethereum works, and what assumptions it makes:
The most exciting (for me) details are in the short thread below.
2/ Any statement about the state of Ethereum, or about any transaction outcome, can be verified on NEAR side, and vice versa. This trivially enables any asset transfers, but it also enables arbitrary cross-chain calls and arbitrary data transfers.
Through the beta program we provide support to people who want to start building their applications and businesses on blockchain, but struggle with the existing scalability and usability issues.
Jun 18, 2019 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
A short thread on HotStuff vs Tendermint for Libra
1/ LibraBFT uses HotStuff as the base for their consensus. I went through the paper today, and it appears to be practically unaltered version of the latest HotStuff that was accepted to PODC'19
Paper: developers.libra.org/docs/assets/pa…2/ HotStuff is a consensus in the same family as Tendermint and PBFT. It improves on Tendermint in two aspects:
1. It is chained, meaning that k view changes take k+2 rounds of communication, instead of 2k 2. It is responsive (see below)
May 25, 2019 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
TL;DR: Avalanche paper has a typo which makes it unsafe, and that typo cripples into existing cryptocurrencies implementations.
1/ Few days ago I posted an article in which I showed few common misconceptions about Avalanche.
2/ While rerunning the experiments for the article I stumbled on a very suspicious behavior, which after some debugging resulted in a discovery of a strategy that would allow adversaries to break *safety* of avalanche (with default parameters) with just 17% malicious actors!
May 20, 2019 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
1/n An interesting game theoretic issue in @iotatoken that I haven't seen discussed much before, which shows the complexities of orchestrating incentives of different parties.
2/n Honest parties in IOTA are expected to perform two random walks on the transactions DAG to find two tips and make their transaction approve those two tips. The random walk favors heavier subdags.
Before we go, a reminder that you can learn more about the technical intricacies of the protocols in our whiteboard sessions with them:
2.1/ [Validators assignment and Runtime] We have a hub, and we have heterogeneous (as in, with different runtimes) spokes (zones / parachains). There's a set of validators on the hub that want to validate the spokes. How do they get a binary with a particular runtime?
Nov 11, 2018 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
1.1/ Few thoughts on on-chain governance:
Ability to update state via on-chain governance bypassing the state-transition function is super dangerous and invalidates the core idea behind smart contracts.
Yet it is necessary since things like TheDAO will be happening.
1.2/
The reasonable solution is to have a flag in smart contracts indicating whether their state can be tampered with via on-chain governance.
This is not my idea, @timothanke suggested it for DFinity couple years back (medium.com/dfinity/the-df…, search for "Omnipotence")
