This workshop will offer insights into permissioned Distributed Ledger Technologies with hands-on examples using the Hyperledger Composer Playground. After a short introduction to distributed ledgers, i.e. Blockchain, the presentation will focus mainly on the open-source consortium known as Hyperledger and, in particular, on IBM’s business-oriented contributions: Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Composer. Examples of the sort of solution patterns currently being deployed will be discussed including: Food Trust (with Walmart, Tyson, etc,), TradeLens (IBM, Maersk, etc.), Everledger (IBM, DeBoer, etc.) and others. Attendees will leave with an understanding of how permissioned DLT differs from Bitcoin, what solutions are being developed, and where opportunities exist for new design patterns.

Blockchain is an evolving technology with the potential to reshape a variety of industries. It allows mutually distrusting parties to interact with each other without relying on a trusted centralized party. Informally, a blockchain is an immutable append-only distributed ledger that records transactions in a way that greatly increases reliability and removes the need for trust. Nevertheless, many organizations are reluctant to fully adopt this technology due to several issues such as scalability, and privacy. The current transaction throughput in blockchains pales in comparison to the throughput needed to run mainstream payment systems or financial markets. Furthermore, organizations and users are particularly not keen on having all of their transactions information being published on a public ledger that can be arbitrarily read without any restrictions by anyone. In this talk, my focus will be on the privacy issue on blockchains particularly on Ethereum. There are various cryptographic protocols that can realize privacy-preserving applications on top of blockchains. As part of my work, I will show how the privacy requirements of building sealed- bid auctions on top of Ethereum can be addressed. Specifically, I will present three different constructions that utilize cryptographic protocols and primitives including Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Commitment schemes, and trusted hardware environments such as Intel SGX. Finally, I will show the pros and cons of each construction and draw out conclusions based on the results.

MakerDao is one of the oldest projects on the Ethereum blockchain and the first truly decentralized stablecoin. It is a platform that realizes the potential of the blockchain, comprised of our stablecoin "Dai", p2p collateral loans called "CDP’s" and decentralized governance. Dai eliminates volatility through an autonomous system of smart contracts, specifically designed to respond to market dynamics. In this talk, we will cover (1) Types of stablecoins and Dai's model; (2) The components of the Maker system including; CDP's (collateralized debt positions), decentralized governance and managing risk with stability fees, keepers and oracles; and (3) Use cases and business applications.

Blockchain can be simply defined as a distributed digital ledger that keeps track of all the transactions that have taken place in a secure, chronological and immutable way using peer-to-peer networking technology. The most known blockchain application is bitcoin that supports transactions of bitcoin transfer. However, blockchain is finding many uses in financial and non-financial applications; indeed, it is believed that blockchain will transform how we live, work, and interact. This talk will start with an introduction to Blockchain technology. It will show how Blockchain works. It will present the concept of smart contracts, which are critical in developing blockchain applications. It will also identify industry segments where blockchain can play a key role in solving existing issues. Then, the talk will address the integration of blockchain and AI; in particular, it will show how Blockchain can help advancing and democratizing AI. The talk will conclude by briefly overviewing our work at Montreal Blockchain Lab and our view on the future of blockchain and its intersection with AI.

Blockchain can be simply defined as a distributed digital ledger that keeps track of all the transactions that have taken place in a secure, chronological and immutable way using peer-to-peer networking technology. The most known blockchain application is bitcoin that supports transactions of bitcoin transfer. However, blockchain is finding many uses in financial and non-financial applications; indeed, it is believed that blockchain will transform how we live, work, and interact. This talk will start with an introduction to Blockchain technology. It will show how Blockchain works. It will present the concept of smart contracts, which are critical in developing blockchain applications. It will also identify industry segments where blockchain can play a key role in solving existing issues. Then, the talk will address the integration of blockchain and AI; in particular, it will show how Blockchain can help advancing and democratizing AI. The talk will conclude by briefly overviewing our work at Montreal Blockchain Lab and our view on the future of blockchain and its intersection with AI.

This talk will start with an introduction to Blockchain technology; it will also briefly cover cryptographic primitives and consensus protocols used to realize Blockchain. It will introduce the concept of smart contracts which are fundamental to the implementation of Blockchain applications. It will present the different categories of Blockchain. Some Blockchain use cases will be presented. The course will conclude with presenting the limitations and the future of Blockchain.

This talk will start with a brief overview of Blockchain technology. Then, it will present some interesting use cases of the technology that have been implemented and tested. More generally, it will identify industry segments where Blockchain can play a key role in solving existing issues. Then, it will identify the limitations of the technology; more attention will be paid to the problem of scalability and off-chain data feeds to the Blockchain (aka oracles). The talk will conclude by briefly overviewing our work at Montreal Blockchain Lab and our view on the future of Blockchain.

Blockchain can be simply defined as a distributed digital ledger that keeps track of all the transactions that have taken place in a secure, chronological and immutable way using peer-to-peer networking technology. The most known blockchain application is bitcoin which supports transactions of bitcoin transfer. However, blockchain is finding many uses in financial and non-financial applications as evidenced by the dramatic increase of interest by industry and government . It is believed that blockchain will transform how the economy works. This talk will start with a brief overview of Blockchain technology. Then, it will present some interesting use cases of the technology that have been implemented and tested. More generally, it will identify industry segments where blockchain can play a key role in solving existing issues. It will identify the limitations of the technology such as the problem of scalability and off-chain data feeds to the blockchain (aka oracles). The talk will conclude by briefly overviewing our work at Montreal Blockchain Lab and our view on the future of blockchain.

Popularly known for powering cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, blockchain is seen as a disruptive technology capable of impacting a wide variety of domains, ranging from finance to governance, by offering superior security, reliability, and transparency in a decentralized manner. In this tutorial presentation, we focus on blockchain systems for enterprise applications and reflect on their design from an academic perspective. We provide an overview of the properties important for blockchain systems, known as the scalability trilemna, and demonstrate how these properties affect the design of an enterprise blockchain platform. We then study in detail the components of Hyperledger Fabric, a permissioned blockchain system, and walk through the life cycle of a transaction. Finally, we briefly mention other systems in the Hyperledger project.

Solidity is the main programming language for writing smart contracts for the Ethereum blockchain. It is a contract-oriented language, which means that smart contracts are responsible for storing all of the programming logic that transacts with the blockchain. In this workshop, we are going to use Remix to write and deploy smart contracts. Remix is a browser-based integrated development environment that allows writing, compiling, debugging and deploying smart contracts. We will use an example contract and we’ll see how we can (a) use Solidity programming language; (b) Edit and write a smart contract in Remix IDE; (c) Compile and debug a smart contract; (d) deploy the contract on EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine); (e) deploy the contract on Ethereum testnet using Metamask; and (f) send transactions to the deployed contract.

This presentation will provide an overview of the MakeDAO protocol and it's decentralized stablecoin "Dai". Topics will cover stablecoins, "DeFi" aka decentralized finance, use cases for stablecoins and overall adoption. We will dive deeper into the technical aspects of the MakerDAO system and discuss a new feature called the Dai Savings Rate (DSR) that allows any Dai holder to earn a variable interest rate creating what is comparable to a savings account on the blockchain.

Built by Block.one, EOSIO is a powerful open-source blockchain protocol that is operating on the bleeding edge of technology. Block.one raised 4 billion dollars during their year-long ICO, which ended with the launch of the EOS public network in June 2018. Since then, Block.one has delivered consistent improvements to EOSIO and the software is now used in over 25 public EOSIO blockchain networks. The EOS public network is the largest and most valuable Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) network in the world and EOS Nation is proud to be voted in by the token holders to secure the network as an active block producer. Token holders who stake their EOS can vote in their favorite block producers and can also transact on the network by using their allocated CPU (computational capacity) and NET (bandwidth) resources. There are many reasons why developers would be interested in building on either EOS or one of the many other public EOSIO networks that are currently running. Some of these reasons and advantages include: know programing languages, flexible smart contract models, powerful account permission structures and a flexible resource model. The highly flexible and customizable nature of EOSIO also allows it to be used by groups, DACs, corporations and governments as a private, permissioned blockchain network. The EOSIO open-source software is also designed for cross-chain interoperability. Innovations such as the DAPP Network are already bridging the gap between many of our favorite blockchains as we pave our way to a multi-chain future.

This presentation will detail Ethereum’s upcoming transition to Ethereum 2.0, from a single-threaded proof of work blockchain to a sharded proof of stake blockchain. It will highlight the various open research questions in this transition. Specifically, it will go over the set of upgrades proposed to the current proof of work chain, bundled under the term "Ethereum 1.x", the linking of the proof of work and proof of stake chains, and the three phases of deployment for Ethereum 2.0. The goal of this presentation is provide a general overview of the various research problems in Ethereum as well as some pointers for students who would like to learn more about or contribute towards solving a specific problem.

Machine learning has recently enabled large advances in artificial intelligence, but these tend to be highly centralized. The large datasets required are generally proprietary; predictions are often sold on a per-query basis; and published models can quickly become out of date without effort to acquire more data and re-train them. In this talk, I will present the proposed framework for participants to collaboratively build a dataset and use smart contracts to host a continuously updated model. This model will be shared publicly on a blockchain where it can be free to use for inference. Ideal learning problems include scenarios where a model is used many times for similar input such as personal assistants, playing games, recommender systems, etc. In order to maintain the model's accuracy with respect to some test set we propose both financial and non-financial (gamified) incentive mechanisms for providing correct data. Our paper is available at http://aka.ms/0xDeCA10B-paper. A free and open source implementation for the Ethereum blockchain is provided at https://github.com/microsoft/0xDeCA10B. The talk will focus on introducing the framework, outlining the proposed incentive mechanisms for providing correct data, and future research directions in this field.

In the context of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, consensus algorithms are a crucial part of every network. We will be looking at the purpose of consensus, how they work, their governance, differences among the most used and how they are applied today in blockchain-based applications.

Dr. William Robinson will present a 40-minute lecture on the topic of decentralized finance (DeFi) and its regulatory implications. The lecture will begin with an introduction to one of many disruptive blockchain technologies, the Uniswap smart contract. For the first time, anonymous liquidity providers are being incentivized to create global markets for anonymous traders. This is made possible by a common blockchain infrastructure and a set of clever cryptographic mechanisms. After this brief introduction to decentralized, automated, and incentivized market making, Dr. Robinson will guide students through two legitimate risks and limitations to regulators. How will users of these new markets be protected? How will governments curb terrorist financing and criminal money laundering?

Blockchain is an evolving technology with the potential to reshape a variety of industries by allowing mutually distrusting parties to interact with each other without relying on a trusted centralized party. Nevertheless, many organizations are reluctant to fully adopt this technology owing to several issues such as scalability and privacy. In the first part of this lecture, my focus will be on the privacy issues in blockchains particularly on Ethereum and some cryptographic techniques that can realize privacy-preserving applications on top of blockchains. In the second part of the lecture, I will present some of our recent work on how to apply these techniques as well as on how to off-load some computations off-chain in a verifiable manner in order to build a scalable open vote network on Ethereum.

Blockchain can be simply defined as a distributed digital ledger that keeps track of all the transactions that have taken place in a secure, chronological and immutable way using peer-to-peer networking technology. The most known blockchain application is bitcoin that supports transactions of bitcoin transfer. However, blockchain is finding many uses in financial and non-financial applications; indeed, it is believed that blockchain will transform how we live, work, and interact. This talk will start with an introduction to Blockchain technology. It will show how Blockchain works. It will present the concept of smart contracts, which are critical in developing blockchain applications. It will also identify industry segments where blockchain can play a key role in solving existing issues. Then, the talk will address the potential of blockchain technology to realize the smart grid vision; in particular, it will show how Blockchain can enable decentralized energy trading. The talk will conclude by briefly overviewing our work at Montreal Blockchain Lab and our view on the future of blockchain.

Decision makers in business are increasingly looking to blockchain technologies to improve efficiency, reduce costs and risks. Blockchain creates synergies among multiple, permissioned organizations, which enables them to create entirely new, higher value business models. Hyperledger Fabric is an enterprise-grade, distributed ledger platform that offers modularity and versatility for a broad set of industry use cases. The modular architecture for Hyperledger Fabric accommodates the diversity of enterprise use cases through plug and play components, such as consensus, privacy and membership services. In this talk, we will introduce Hyperledger fabric and cover some use cases. The focus will be to build a Digital Asset Management (DAM) application by creating and deploying a smart contract on a Hyperledger Fabric Network created on IBM Blockchain Platform.

Solidity is the main programming language for writing smart contracts for the Ethereum blockchain. It is a contract-oriented language, which means that smart contracts are responsible for storing all of the programming logic that transacts with the blockchain. In this workshop, we are going to use Remix to write and deploy a number smart contracts. Remix is a browser-based integrated development environment that allows writing, compiling, debugging and deploying smart contracts. In this workshop, we will (1) Learn Solidity programming language; (2) Edit and write smart contracts in Remix IDE; (3) Compile and debug smart contracts; (4) Deploy contracts on the JavaScript EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine); (5) Deploy contracts on an Ethereum test net using Metamask; and (6) Call transactions on the deployed contracts.

This presentation will address the role of data mesh in today’s blockchain industry and the obstacles of current data infrastructure such as single data schema, inefficient retrieval, and lack of data privacy and protection. Audiences will also be able to gain a better understanding on how Stratos’ data mesh supports DApp, DEX and other application developers to deploy, store and execute code, and process data more efficiently. This talk will be discussing how Strato’s data mesh could be applied in various use cases including trends DeFi, smart contracts, NFI, etc.

We are moving from a centralized Identity Model to a decentralized one, focused on privacy and security. In this new model, the user becomes a new source for authentication, and can identity herself against any other service by sharing a set of Verifiable Credentials (Signed LD-JSON) under her control. Just like a physical wallet with cards we can show to get access to places, but with a higher degree of privacy. On this talk, We will do an introduction to Self-Sovereign Identity: Understanding DIDs and Verifiable credentials.

A large portion of the world's compute capacity goes unused in idling servers and home computers. Lots of projects are attempting to make use of this capacity to drive low cost computation using blockchain technology to maintain network state and consensus. In this talk, we will look at these efforts, challenges and the realities of competing with centralized cloud service providers.

This presentation will touch on what NFT's (Non-fungible Token) are and how they enable creators to tokenize their digital works on a blockchain. It will then cover how Async Art builds on this with programmable art and some potential use cases.

MakerDAO enables the generation of Dai, the world’s first unbiased currency and leading decentralized stablecoin. Dai eliminates volatility through an autonomous system of smart contracts called the Maker Protocol, as well as through decentralized community governance. In this talk, I will cover the working of MakerDAO.

We envision a future where the world will use a single decentralized stable cryptocurrency based on Universal Basic Income and demurrage. Using distributed ledger technology solves the 3rd party trust problem, but introduces the problem of scaling to handle the transaction volume and data storage of billions of people. This requires the system to be able to process millions of transactions per second. The system also needs petabytes of storage capacity to hold records for billions of users. To handle these kinds of scaling requirements we propose a distributed ledger that shards the transaction processing and data storage so that more nodes participating in the network provides more processing and storage resources. A distributed ledger based on state sharding called Shardus is being developed to address this problem.

Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is a digitized domestic currency where the central bank issues new digital money equivalent to its domestic currency. CBDC could be issued using distributed ledger technology (DLT), where transactions would operate and settle on a peer-to-peer basis. There are two types of CBDC, retail and wholesale. Retail or General purpose CBDC is peer-to-peer payments and payments from consumers to merchants. Wholesale CBDC is issued for specific use by commercial banks and clearing houses aiming at more efficient interbank payments. Many central banks have already engaged in or about to begin the CBDC framework. Quite a few central banks start their CBDC projects building proofs of concept (PoCs) using DLT to replicate wholesale payment systems such as the Monetary Authorities of Singapore (Project Ubin), Bank of Canada (Project Jasper), and Bank of Thailand (Project Inthanon), and now looking for expanding their uses to other use cases such as cross- border remittance and delivery versus Payment (DvP). With an announcement of Facebook's Diem or Libra global stable coin and global pandemic, which encourages digital payments, many central banks accelerate their study in retail CBDC. Some have already started testing, for example, in China. In this talk, I will present the current body of knowledge in the field of CBDC, the issues and challenges in CBDC design, and a discussion of future works.

Blockchain has drawn much attention and has been widely deployed in recent years. However, blockchain scalability is emerging as a challenging issue. This tutorial will overview existing solutions to blockchain scalability, which can be classified into two categories: first layer and second layer solutions. First layer solutions propose modifications to the blockchain (i.e., changing the blockchain structure, such as block size) while second layer solutions propose mechanisms that are implemented outside of the blockchain. In particular, we focus on sharding as a promising first layer solution to the scalability issue; the basic idea behind sharding is to divide the blockchain network into multiple committees, each processing a separate set of transactions. More specifically, (a) we propose a taxonomy based on committee formation and intra-committee consensus; and (b) we compare the main existing sharding-based blockchain protocols. We also present a performance-based comparative analysis (i.e., throughput and latency) of the advantages and disadvantages of existing scalability solutions. Finally, we present a security analysis of sharding-based blockchain protocols.

After emerging with bitcoin in 2008, cryptocurrencies are increasingly becoming viewed as a new mainstream asset class. Cryptocurrency trading has grown substantially in the past 12+ years, and along with it the number and diversity of market participants including retail traders, institutional investors, industrial players such as miners, corporations, trading desks and market makers. Cryptocurrency "exchanges" launched to support these participants have become some of the most valuable companies in the industry. The immaturity of the industry has been reflected in examples of spectacular exchange failures and frauds. ErisX was launched in response to the gaps in market infrastructure and oversight. The company has brought technology, operations, licensing and products that are largely taken for granted in traditional finance to the market to bring greater performance and confidence to cryptocurrency trading.

Blockchain has drawn much attention and has been widely deployed in recent years. However, blockchain scalability is emerging as a challenging issue. This tutorial will overview the challenges and solutions to blockchain scalability.

Blockchain can be simply defined as a distributed digital ledger that keeps track of all the transactions that have taken place in a secure, chronological and immutable way using peer-to-peer networking technology. The most known blockchain application is bitcoin that supports transactions of bitcoin transfer. However, blockchain is finding many uses in financial and non-financial applications; indeed, it is believed that blockchain will transform how we live, work, and interact. This talk will start with an introduction to Blockchain technology. It will show how Blockchain works. It will present the concept of smart contracts, which are critical in developing blockchain applications. It will also identify industry segments where blockchain can play a key role in solving existing issues. The talk will conclude by briefly overviewing our work at Montreal Blockchain Lab and our view on the future of blockchain.

The talk is about how the Shardus team is leveraging the Shardus framework to build an EVM compatible SCP.

Sooner than later, everyone will be working for a Protocol. With the decline of trust in western institutions, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations rise to organize different communities and coordinate efforts. In this talk we will explore: what a DAO is, and when does it thrive; the pillars of a working DAO; the stages of a DAO, and how to prepare for the next steps; tokenomics and aligning incentives; building the Community around the DAO; some challenges DAOs face when scaling; and some challenges contributors face when working for a DAO

In this talk, we will cover: the difference between an NFT, digital art, and traditional art; the difference between a regular NFT, and a piece of Async’s programmable art (Layered artwork and Autonomous artwork); Where does the value of Programmable Art come from (Provenance, Permanence , and Programmability); What is Async Blueprint - a generative project template that can go beyond PFPs; How are all these created - through a system of Master and Layers; This Master and Layers system gave birth to Async Music, taking the same concept, music has Master track and Stems; A few real-world use cases for Programmable & Generative art; and What’s coming up on Async Art - Audio Blueprint