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Vivek Bagaria, a PhD student at Stanford, will be giving a talk about blockchain scalability.

We're very happy to have Vivek Bagaria [1] speaking on "Prism: Operating Blockchains At Physical Limits" [2]. Vivek is a PhD student at Stanford, working with David Tse [3] on machine learning, computational genomics, and statistics. We are always happy to hear new approaches solving to blockchain scalability, which is the first on Vitalik's list of "Problems" [4]. This is the first time I've seen a blockchain paper come from electrical engineering (information theory) academics; I'm looking forward to the talk! Vivek's abstract follows:

"Transaction throughput, confirmation latency and confirmation reliability are important performance measures of a blockchain protocol. These measures are limited by two underlying physical network attributes: communication capacity and speed-of-light propagation delay. Existing systems operate far away from these physical limits. In this work we introduce Prism, a new blockchain protocol, which can provably achieve 1) security against up to 50% adversarial hashing power; 2) optimal throughput up to the capacity C of the network; 3) confirmation latency for honest transactions proportional to the propagation delay D, with confirmation error probability exponentially small in the bandwidth-delay product CD ; 4) eventual total ordering of all transactions. Our approach to the design of this protocol is based on deconstructing the blockchain into its basic functionalities and systematically scaling up these functionalities to approach their physical limits."

We are very grateful to BNY Mellon Innovations [5] for hosting us and the Decentralization Foundation [6] for sponsoring. Please join us!

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/vivek-bagaria-7a833637/
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.08092
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Tse
[4] https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Problems#1-blockchain-scalability
[5] https://www.bnymellon.com/us/en/who-we-are/innovation-center/silicon-valley-innovation-center.jsp
[6] https://d24n.org/