[Transforming digital identity into Self Sovereign Identity]

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.

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?

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.

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.

[Dinsdale-Young et al. [DMMNT19]]

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]

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.

Bernardo David, presented the first composable treatment of timing-based cryptographic primitives, defining and UC-realizing ideal functionalities for time lock puzzles (TLPs).

Check out his papers here: https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/537 and https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/784

Not surprised bright minds like Bernardo are working with Concordium, to build a science based next generation blockchain.

Sharding not only helps overcome scalability issues. Intershard signaling allows transactions between shards and communication of smart contracts on different shards. Concordium's sharding protocol for this operates as follows :

When a block finalizes on a shard, it contains a list of outgoing messages for other shards. The nodes of the sending shard sign the list of outgoing messages.

The nodes in the receiving shard can obtain the list of nodes running on the sending shard together with their public keys from the control chain, which allows them to verify the signed messages from the sending shard.

Once a message is verified, it is executed on the receiving shard.

[private shards.]

The main goal of sharding is to overcome scalability issues. Without sharding, every node in the network has to process all transactions and execute all smart contracts.

The basic idea of sharding is to parallelize execution by dividing the network into smaller components or shards.

Nodes are then assigned to different shards with separate account balances. Each shard essentially corresponds to a separate blockchain that can be run almost independently of the other shards. This means that transactions on one shard are only processed by the nodes on that shard and, consequently, more transactions can be processed overall.

The sharding mechanism also allows private shards. In a private shard the control chain cannot see the transactions on the shard, it only provides FaaS( Finality as a Service ) and coordination to relaunch deadlocked shards.

The private shard can ultimately run its own consensus algorithm and use its own identity providers and anonymity revokers.

Private shards provide a cheap way for an individual, country or corporation to launch their own blockchain. Private shards benefit from the use of GTU and tooling provided by Concordium as well as the control chain that acts as a fallback mechanism.

This unique approach by Concordium will help scale Enterprise Blockchain on Public Blockchains.

[Concordium’s finality layer]

What do you guys think about Concordium's two-layer approach?

Concordium’s finality layer can be added on top of Nakamoto-style consensus (NSC) blockchains as systems where parties participate in a form of lottery to win the right to append blocks to the chain. The probability that a certain party wins the lottery depends on how much of the required resource they have, for example computing power for proof of work systems or stake for PoS systems.

Their finality layer allows them to dynamically ‘checkpoint’ the blockchain by using Byzantine agreement to identify and then mark common blocks in the chains of honest users as final. This two-layer approach provides the best of both worlds according to their researchers.

They achieve the following in particular:

• As long as corruption is below ⅓, their finality layer declares blocks as final faster than the finality rule in a pure NSC blockchain, which is required to wait for ‘sufficiently many’ blocks.

• When corruption is between ⅓ and ½, they can still rely on their NSC blockchain and obtain the same guarantees as a pure NSC blockchain.

They also ask us to note that pure CBFT( committee-based Byzantine fault tolerant ) such as the ones used in Tendermint [Kwo14] and Algorand [CM19] designs fail completely under these conditions.

[Concordium]

Concordium is currently working to build the world’s leading "science" based open-source, permissionless, and decentralized blockchain with built-in user identity at the protocol level. Concordium supports regulatory compliance, allowing businesses to harness the power of blockchain technology. I think this approach is really important when we look at it from an enterprise point of view. Business', especially the private centralized ones are in general very "skeptical"  when it comes to open sourced technology mainly because they are scared that the 'openness' may affect their IP or to lose power over their technology, or fear organizations without any head, because they want someone to take responsibility in case they need support at any point of time.

I also like their research and science first approach. It is obvious to see great technology when some of the most brilliant minds come together.

Concordium has put together Concordium Blockchain Research Center Aarhus (COBRA) to provide the basic research needed to build energy-efficient and scalable blockchain technology that is provably secure.

20 researchers and scientists at COBRA are performing research in blockchain technology, foundational blockchain theory, and cryptography. They are developing new protocols for efficient and secure consensus algorithms,sharding mechanisms, new cryptographic techniques supporting privacy-preserving identification, anonymous payments, better zero-knowledge techniques, and languages for smart contracts.

All research performed in the center is open source and patent-free and will help build a solid foundation for the entire blockchain space. COBRA was created as a partnership between Aarhus University and the Concordium Foundation with grants from Concordium running into a few Million Euros.

Concordium even has some prestigious partners from the Academia like ETH Zurich which is ranked 3rd in the world for engineering and technology (1st in Europe). ETH Zurich has been affiliated with 32 Nobel Laurates,4 Fields Medalists, and 1 Turing Award winner including Albert Einstein.

IT University of Copenhagen, one of Denmark’s leading universities on IT research and education is a partner too. Indian Institute of Science (IISc) India's leading Research, Science, Engineering Institute is associated with Concordium as well.

There was no ICO for this project and looks like the money is being judiciously put to use for research purposes. I am glad that the industry is maturing and so are the players. ICO's and IEO's are great ways of funding models as well but more often than not, take too long to meet their goals with respect to provable research and results. Making sure protocol's are technically sound will be important in gaining enterprise adoption. The true potential of blockchain technology lies with public permissionless blockchains, enterprises have realized this as well especially after experimenting a plenty with closed and private blockchain environments.

I will be doing a deep dive into their research papers in the coming days. Are you aware of any other blockchain projects who are giving importance to research first approach?

To err is human to forgive is nobody goes the stying in the blockchain world. Sometimes, business' wish they could say the same about the smart contracts created. Some reports estimate that 25% of all smart contracts contain critical bugs, 60% of all projects Hasho ( a security audit firm ) had atleast one single bug.

For businesses that rely on smart contracts, it is critical that they operate as intended and without bugs or security issues.

Concordium https://concordium.com/ has developed two novel programming languages, Midlang and Retlang, that make smart contracts easier to develop and more reliable to deploy.

Midlang, built on Erlang and Elm, models problems clearly and precisely, while also being simple enough to allow for easy on-boarding. Midlang code compiles to Retlang, a new low-level language that allows for formal verification and static analysis of smart contracts.

Concordium is also apparently building tools for formal verification of smart contracts.

Making sure blockchain is business ready is a very important aspect to consider for the industry to grow at industrial levels. There has been a popular myth business' need only private blockchains to be deployed to see success. Its nice to see novel projects like Concordium come up with unique approaches to make this happen.

[Achieving finality in blockchain protocols is a challenging issue]

Achieving finality in blockchain protocols is a challenging issue that has recently become the focus of major research efforts across the world.

Most existing blockchains either rely on a Nakamoto-style of consensus, where the chain can fork and produce rollbacks, or on a committee-based Byzantine fault tolerant (CBFT) consensus, where no rollbacks are possible. While the latter ones offer better consistency, the former can be more efficient, tolerate more corruptions, and offer better availability during bad network conditions.

When researching more about the issue I finally found some interesting research that has been ongoing for sometime, but hasn't been in the limelight. I am watching this very closely and found some startling revelations and see where this is all leading up to.

It is certainly a major challenge to engineer a high assurance implementation of a finality layer such as Afgjort and execute it over a blockchain protocol with a large enough user base (and a proper stake distribution) guaranteeing that less than one-third of the committee is malicious.

Finality layer can be combined with a Nakamoto-style blockchain and periodically declare blocks as final, preventing rollbacks beyond final blocks.

It sure has been one of the most interesting research topics in blockchain, that I believe is a unique breakthrough in the blockchain world which very few blockchains have achieved.

What was even more interesting was all this research finally lead me to Concordium, and I've become a huge fan of this project since after diving deep about what they have been silently researching for a very longtime away from all the limelight.

In the coming days I will be researching in detail and sharing my insights.

Personal Information on being collected, should be destroyed as soon as it is no longer required. Not only would this protect privacy, it would also improve security. If personal information is only collected when absolutely necessary, it is less likely to fall into the wrong hands. If it is destroyed when it is no longer required, it is less likely to become incorrect and out of date. But that also brings about another issue of recollection of data again. With such recurring processes, it is likely that data leaks may occur.

The Snowden revelations brought to the public, knowledge that most of our personal data is collected in an indiscriminate manner by the governments. Sometimes we may have a choice,and sometimes we don't really have a choice if we want to be law abiding citizens. Does this means we need to trade off our privacy in return to be law abiding?

Any data protection law has to limit such mass survelliance or "dragnet" surveillance as it contravenes the principles of necessity , purpose limitation.  

When such is the case Do you think we can harness the power of blockchain by having a identity layer which will satisfy both needs, the authorities need to carry out verification in a safe way and for the citizens to be sure that their data is not misused?

The majority of democratic countries have recognized that privacy is a fundamental human right which needs to be protected. Hence putting this very right to jeopardy makes no sense.

Blockchain ,Privacy and Identity go hand in hand. Which can help achieve end goals for everyone securely , accurately and safely. I have been researching blockchains that enable this.

I see many projects coming out there "claiming" to be private. "Claiming" to be anonymous. In the year of regulation. What do you think is more important? Privacy? Or anonymity? Can they both exist? Especially with increasing government and regulatory scrutiny?