Since our convenience layer monitors all events in the smart contract, it recognises that a new submission triggers the smart contract. So it looks for a possible match between the hash saved in the database and the hash stored in the blockchain.

In doing so, EUREKA’s convenience layer is able to keep the front-end updated about the current state of the submitted draft and the executed transactions.

Do you think blockchain needs a critical mass for adoption of this technology? What are the challenges to mass adoption?

In my opinion, blockchain technology and the way we now interact with the blockchain sound complicated for people who don’t have a technical background. So if the community continues to improve all blockchain-related services for the average user, it’s going to become normal to talk about public and private keys. That would be a great step towards mass adoption. So the critical point is that there is a lot of misinformation about blockchain, and this technology has some barriers to overcome, but I’m confident that the users will overcome these barriers.

So, what you’re doing is making the EUREKA Platform as user-friendly as possible to remove those barriers.

Yes. So, for example, the simple step of getting of putting your public and private key into MetaMask and that’s it. You can use the platform. It has been a big challenge to get the platform to this level of accessibility but it works. There are more solutions and we rely on our growing community to get to the next step.

What research have you been involved in?

I approached blockchain in 2016. The first topics of interest for were about security challenges in smart contracts. I’ve studied well known attacks, for example DAOs, on smart contracts. Then I was involved in blockchain governance research, for example, the way in which everyone thinks that blockchain is a new sources of problems for decision making processes. My other research has concerned ScienceMatters and how the possibilities for improving science publishing have come up.