The title of this page should be the name of the working group
A decentralized storage provides a single source of truth for data, with unparalleled privacy, security, and transparenxcy.
There are three relevant data trends. One, data is expected to grow from 33 ZB (zettabytes) today to 175 ZB in 5 years. Two, data breaches are a growing problem with $150M+ liability issues. Tbree, the cloud needs to move to the edge for performance and availability, driven by IoT applications, multi-player gaming, autonomous vehicles, and content streaming. Decentralization accelerates this change and adoption, as it lowers deployment, management, and scale-out cost while providing better security, performance, and availability.
The scope is to define concepts regarding smart contracts and to produce material to describe the various aspects and meanings, trying to come up to standards or good practices. The audience for smart contracts is large and spans from researchers, developers, businessmen, decision makers, policy makers, law makers, software users, citizens to governments, banks, financial institutions, insurance providers, etc
Some research topics and separation of interest are:
- Stack machines vs automata vs manipulating algebraic types embedded in a another language
- Scope for less expressive languages (that may have more tractability for formal methods)
- Execution determinism, and sources of non-determinism in existing languages
- Cost models for metering computation (e.g. gas)
- Paradigms for smart contracts - e.g. 'identity-oriented', functional, process-oriented - extent to which smart contracts benefit from special purpose languages
- Parallelism of execution, state independence (i.e. parallel processing in a single block)
- What properties should smart contracts with 'legal charge' have?
- What relations can smart contracts have with actual contracts and agreements?
- At what scale to smart contracts best contribute to certainty and execution of agreement?
- What relationship do legal smart contracts have to models of computation?
- Verifiable and authenticated data structures - e.g. Merkle dags, log-backed maps,
- How best to expose through smart contract languages/libraries
- Sharing state back-ends across execution engines
- Conflict-free and additive data structures
- Multi-party secure computation
- Differential privacy
- Zero knowledge and practical building blocks - types of commitments and witnesses
- WASM/eWASM
- EVM
- WebIDL
The anticipated initial work products will include (but is not limited to):
Please list the work products that the group expects to initially focus on, such as white papers, use cases, case studies, or a face-to-face event. Ideally, these are measurable work products that help the TSC assess whether the working group is making progress.
This working group will collaborate with other Hyperledger working groups, the TSC, Linux Foundation staff, and the project maintainers.
Please provide any specific working groups or projects that this working group will immediately collaborate with.
The following individuals have already expressed an interest in joining this working group, and we hope they will become contributors over the first year:
List of interested parties (listed with their consent), including name, association, and optionally email addresses.
| Name | Company | Email Address |
|---|---|---|
The following individual has volunteered to serve as the initial chair for the working group:
Provide the name of the person who will serve as the initial chair for this working group. Usually this is the person who has been most active in encouraging the development of the working group. The chair will kick off the discussions and work products, as well as, manage the tone and cadence of the conversations. The TSC will appoint a chair along with the approval of the working group. See the working group process for information on the responsibilities of the chair.