Dear Friends,

March has been a busy month for the POA team. The team was spread all over the globe from the DC Blockchain Summit, ScalingNOW! scaling conversation in Barcelona, and ETHCC in Paris where POA won ETHPrize for our open blockchain explorer, Explorer by POA!

We would also like to celebrate three months since our mainnet launch!

1. ETHPrize

On Saturday, March 10th, in EthCC in Paris, POA Network was announced to be one of the two ETHPrize bounty winners. The ETHPrize is $250,000 which will allow POA to create the open source blockchain Ethereum explorer. We published a post about it here!

2. Open Source Blockchain Explorer NOW!

Coming off winning the ETHPrize for the Blockchain explorer, Igor Barinov, and Andrew Cravenho joined a hangout with MyEtherWallet, Ubiq, and Giveth in the first of many hangouts where they discuss collaborations on the new open source blockchain explorers! Check out the video below

3. ScalingNOW gathering In Barcelona

On the week of March 5th, Web3 Foundation and Giveth hosted the #ScalingNOW gathering in Barcelona, exploring Ethereum scaling solutions. Roman Storm, Viktor Baranov, and Alex Kolotov were representing POA Network. Roman and Alexander speak in the first video below about POA’s Network approach to scaling Ethereum. We also have an interview with Victor and Alex about POA Network in the second video. Check them out both below!



Roman and Alexander discussing POA Network’s approach to scaling Ethereum at ScalingNOW!



Interview with Victor and Alex about POA Network

4. CPC Cryptocurrency and Exchange Conference

Andrew Cravenho, POA Explorer project lead, attended CPC Cryptocurrency and Exchange Conference at Stanford University. As a guest speaker, he talked about POA Network, onchain governance, differences between Ethereum and POA, and Explorer by POA. Check out the video below!

5. POA gets added to CitoWise Ethereum wallet!

After already being added to Coinomi and Trustwallet, CitoWise has now integrated POA into their mobile Ethereum wallet! The wallet is currently only available on Android with an iOS release date coming later this year.

6. Upcoming events

With March being such a busy month for us with the team being all over the globe, April finds the team landing in Toronto. We are sponsoring Cryptochicks Hackathon with our very own validator Sherina Yang being one of the guest speakers! If you are in Toronto on the April 6th weekend, please reach out to the team.

Humans of POA #6

With this issue of Humans of POA, we would like to introduce the community to one of our Rust developers: Vladimir Komendantskiy

What is your name: Vladimir Komendantskiy

What is your role: Rust developer. POA Network has adopted the advanced programming language Rust on a large scale following current trends in Ethereum community. In particular, Parity – which is a huge project in itself – is written in Rust, which makes it necessary for POA Network to have Rust developers working full-time on R&D projects. Rust is becoming a lingua franca for many communities. This makes it a good choice as a language for writing network bridges.

Why did you join the POA team: Apart from Rust, I bring in experience in formal verification, theorem proving and distributed systems. For several years before I actually worked as a software engineer in various microcontroller electronics projects.

What are you currently working on: Consensus Algorithm. Consensus is the staple algorithm of a distributed system, and of a cryptocurrency network in particular. The subject of consensus appears to be well-studied but not yet mature. Recently there have been both theoretical developments and implementations addressing various vulnerabilities or inefficiencies in existing variants of consensus. POA Network has conducted an independent assessment of Parity consensus algorithm called AuRa. This assessment has identified the inherent synchrony of that algorithm as one of potential weaknesses. Indeed, synchronous algorithms often cause bottlenecks or require increased message complexity which can open a backdoor for a potential attacker. This problem was addressed in a recent consensus paper “The Honey Badger of BFT Protocols”. The algorithm presented here is called HoneyBadgerBFT, the name meant to appeal to Bitcoin affictionados circa 2011-2013 (https://www.wired.com/2013/12/bitcoin-honey/). I’m implementing this algorithm in Rust. When this is finished, we will plug it into Parity and fire up a round of performance benchmarks and do a security review.

What is a typical day working with POA: Most of my day is usually Rust coding and debugging. I’m pretty much focused on the HoneyBadgerBFT implementation at the moment. I also have to familiarise myself with libraries used in the Parity project. There are quite a few. Therefore I spend about 10% of my time reading Rust library code written by others and experimenting with it. I’m also writing slides for my upcoming presentation at Edinburgh Rust meetup at the end of March.

How do you see POA Network evolving in a year and going forward: When we finish the implementation of HoneyBadgerBFT, we are planning to plug it into Parity as a “modular consensus” and possibly apply it within POA Network’s own developments. One such application can be an establishment of meta-consensus between different networks connected via bridges currently under development at POA Network. It would be interesting to see if we can bridge not only blockchains of different networks but also higher-order features such as smart contracts. That is if a smart contract written in terms of one network can be executed on another network via a bridge.

That’s it for this update! As always, we’re looking forward to your feedback and welcome your ideas on the project’s future development!

Keep in touch & be the first to know

Stay tuned for more updates at POA Network Medium and Twitter .