[Lecture Series Spring’23]
Abstract
Recently, Web3 has gained massive attention by major analysts such as Gartner, Forrester, Forbes Technology Council and the Harvard Business Review. The Web3 vision takes blockchain disintermediation to a next level by making it ubiquitous, encompassing not only payments and financial services but also digital identities, data and business models. Albeit the current enthusiasm, it is still not clear how Web3 can actually be implemented. Therefore, in this talk, we want to share and discuss with you our recent insights from a series of blockchain-related research and engineering efforts. We start our journey with KSI Cash, a sharded blockchain technology with unlimited scalability that we have designed for the European Central Bank in order to assess the feasibility of a digital euro. Next, we explain the concept of a next generation blockchain platform, called Alphabill, which enables universal asset tokenization and transfer as a global medium of exchange. Furthermore, we reflect on the necessary theoretical foundations of scalable implementations of blockchain-based payment systems.
Speaker
Ahto Buldas
Ahto Buldas is professor of cryptography at Tallinn University of Technology. Ahto studied computer science at Tallinn University of Technology (1985-1991) and holds an MSc on simulation techniques for Boolean circuits (1992) and a PhD on computational algebraic graph theory (1999). Ahto’s research interests are related to applied cryptography. His time-stamping related research started in 1997 and he has published papers in the conferences Crypto, Asiacrypt and PKC. Ahto participated in the development of the Estonian Digital Signature Act and the Estonian eID card (1996-2002). His current research interests also include risk analysis methods, including attack-tree semantics and game-theoretical approaches to risk analysis. Ahto Buldas is a co-founder of Guardtime and also of Cybernetica AS.
Dirk Draheim
Dirk Draheim received the PhD from Freie Universität Berlin and the habilitation from Universität Mannheim, Germany. Currently, he is a full professor of information society technology at Tallinn University of Technology (Taltech), Estonia, head of the Taltech Information Systems Group and holds the Taltech National Professorship in Information Society Technology. The Information Systems Group conducts research in large and ultra-large-scale IT systems. He is also an initiator and leader of numerous digital transformation initiatives. Dirk is the author of the Springer books ”Business Process Technology”, ”Semantics of the Probabilistic Typed Lambda Calculus” and ”Generalized Jeffrey Conditionalization”, and co-author of the Springer book ”Form-Oriented Analysis.
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