Tuesday September 26, 2017
Interactive Video Broadcast from Gates Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
Time: Sept. 26, 2017, 1:30-2:30pm EDT. IC3 members apply here.
Abstract: Blockchain protocols such as Bitcoin are gaining traction for exchanging payments in a secure and decentralized manner. Their need to achieve consensus across a large number of participants, however, fundamentally limits their performance.
This webinar will focus on off-chain payment schemes, with particular emphasis on Teechain, a new off-chain payment protocol that utilizes trusted execution environments (TEEs) to perform secure, efficient and scalable fund transfers on top of a blockchain. We will also cover the Lightning Network, and highlight Teechain’s advantages, such as being able to operate without having to monitor the blockchain at all. Teechain is failure resilient and performs multihop transfers that are atomic, without the possibility of funds getting stuck on intermediary nodes. We’ll show with a full implementation that the approach achieves orders of magnitude improvement in most metrics compared to existing implementations of payment channels.
Bio: Emin Gün Sirer, is a Professor at Cornell as well as a Co-Director of IC3. My research spans operating systems, networking and distributed systems. My current projects involve a novel secure operating system and system infrastructure for high-performance cloud computing applications. I like building things, especially systems that have some principled reason for why they should work.