TED talks, SF Blockchain Week, auditing OMG Plasma, and more. From one of our engineers getting recognized by the Mathematical Association of America to writing a book on smart contract security fundamentals, it’s been a busy month for Team Quantstamp! Here’s what we’ve been up to:

OMG Plasma Audit

Quantstamp is proud to announce that we have conducted one of our most significant audits yet! We recently finished our audit of OmiseGo’s MVP Plasma implementation. This is a big deal because plasma is a Layer 2 scaling solution that could have huge implications on the future of Ethereum.

If Ethereum is going to achieve mainstream adoption, it needs to scale — and Plasma is a leading Layer 2 scaling solution being developed in the Ethereum ecosystem. We’re confident the entire ecosystem will benefit from scalability and are committed to helping ensure that scalability improvements are secure.

The detailed report will be coming out soon in an upcoming press release.

Further Decentralizing Our Protocol

Storage Solutions

Decentralization is an iterative process! We are currently working on further decentralizing our protocol by removing our dependencies on centralized services. When it comes to storing our scan reports, we are exploring different options in order to store these scans in a decentralized fashion.

The criteria we are using to evaluate decentralized storage solutions includes, but is not limited to, the following:

Is this storage solution peer to peer?

Does this solution have a single point of failure?

Will storage be immutable?

Is this solution production ready?

Governance

In the future, we aim to let the Quantstamp community upgrade the protocol. We are actively researching existing on-chain and off-chain governance solutions.

Policing Quantstamp Nodes

Currently we are using whitelisted nodes to conduct smart contract code scans. We eventually want anyone to be able to download a Quantstamp node and conduct code scans in the network. Before we can do that, however, we need to figure out how to prevent a malicious attacker from compromising scan.

We are currently researching several options to help ensure that the Quantstamp protocol produces quality code scans despite the existence of malicious actors. We are currently exploring using a policing node that reviews the work of scanning nodes to check for correctness.

We are also exploring redundant computations. This means that a requestor can choose to get a scan conducted by multiple (N) nodes. In this scenario, if I wanted to ensure that I received a non-malicious scan report, I could ask for five nodes to each independently scan my Solidity code. I can then compare the five separate scan reports to make sure none of them were malicious.

Betanet UI

We continued our efforts this month to improve the betanet monitoring UI, and we’re excited to share a sneak peek with the Quantstamp community.

Early UI Rendering

SF Blockchain Week

ETHSanFrancisco

We were excited to take part in ETHSanFrancisco, the “World’s largest Ethereum hackathon,” offering over $5K in prizes to make smart contracts safer. Huge congrats to Jacob Mortensen and his project Quantstamp Badge for winning the ETHSanFrancisco bounty for Best Improvement of Audit Reporting. Check out the project and his Github here.

Betanet and Bagels

What better way to celebrate an exciting milestone than with bagels? Following the recent betanet launch and knowing a good portion of our global team would be in town for Blockchain Week, we took the opportunity to “break bread” with team, partners, friends and supporters that have been with us along the way.

All About Blockchains

On Friday, October 5, Quantstamp team members hosted “All About Blockchains” at the University of Waterloo, drawing in a number of students interested in hearing more about Quantstamp and getting into the blockchain space.

Polychain Capital Web3 Stack event

Quantstamp Senior Research Engineer Dr. Ed Zulkoski at Polychain Capital’s Web3 Stack event.

On Oct 8, we attended a Web3 Stack event event at Polychain Capital where Quantstamp’s Senior Security Engineer Ed Zulkoski presented “Towards decentralized approaches to smart contract analysis”.

150+ attendees got the latest on distributed ledger tech, cloud computing and privacy-preserving techniques for decentralized data sharing, storage and smart contracts verification.

Other Events

World Knowledge Forum 2018

CEO Richard Ma speaking about “Security and the mainstream adoption of blockchain” to a packed audience at the World Knowledge Forum 2018 in Seoul.

Richard, Kei and Yohei headed to Seoul to meet with several partners and participate in the World Knowledge Forum conference. This multi-disciplinary gathering of thought leaders saw participants including Janet Yellen, and Tim Draper.

Smart Contract Security Meetup

Senior Research Engineer Dr. Martin Derka speaks on Smart Contract Security

Members of the Quantstamp team headed to The Hague, Netherlands to take part in a meetup on smart contract security and speak a bit about our upcoming Assurance Protocol. Jared Harrill, Martin Derka, and Steven Stewart shared how the Quantstamp network functions, what to expect running a node, and how people can get involved (hint: apply here!)

New Hires

We welcome Arshdeep Tinna to our team as a DevOps Engineer. Prior to joining Quantstamp, Arshdeep worked in Operations at Thomson Reuters, ZScaler, Paytm, SmartThings, and Dimension Data. As a DevOps Engineer, Arshdeep will help maintain the smooth delivery of the Quantstamp Protocol.

Media and Speaking

VP of Strategy @OlgaVMack has come a long way to be standing on the @TedxSFbay stage. Thanks to MatthewMarkert for the capture. 📷

It was a busy month for Olga Mack, VP of Strategy here at Quantstamp. Olga graced the stage at TedxSFBay to explore the intersection of smart contracts and law. Sharing photos, experiences and stories from her childhood, she painted a compelling vision for a world with endless creativity and seamless connections.

Olga also shared about smart contracts and blockchain at the Masters Conference in San Francisco, a boutique educational forum aimed at tackling challenges in the legal space.

Part engineer, part lawyer, Linda Selker is an adaptive leader and lifetime student we’re proud to have on our team. In addition to everything on her plate as Head of Legal at Quantstamp, Linda carved out some time this month to teach Cornell Tech law students about blockchain and smart contracts.

Kei Oda, Quantstamp Head of Japan and APAC, made an appearance at the Metaps Global Crypto Conference, sharing about Smart Contract Security in the Blockchain Ecosystem.

Changing Legislation

Our VP of Strategy Olga V. Mack, in collaboration with the Blockchain Advocacy Coalition, helped educate California legislators to facilitate the passage of two blockchain bills into law.

Olga played an important role in moving us towards this exciting milestone! On September 28, 2018, Governor Jerry Brown signed AB 2658 by Assemblymember Ian Calderon and SB 838 by Senator Robert Hertzberg.

Fundamentals of Smart Contract Security

The Quantstamp team has been hard at work developing Fundamentals of Smart Contract Security, expected to release in December. This book will provide an in-depth look at both the issues involved in smart contract security, and practical examples of vulnerabilities in the wild.

Awards

Somebody got mail this month from the Mathematical Association of America. Props to our Senior Research Engineer Martin Derka for winning a major publication award for his expository paper, Build a Sporadic Group in Your Basement.

Node Operators for Betanet

After the first wave, Quantstamp is continuing to onboard node operators for betanet. Interested in contributing to the network by becoming a node operator and earning QSP? Apply here and stay tuned for our upcoming Medium post where we’ll share all the details about the what, how and why.

Onboarding the first wave of whitelisted node operators.

Forging Connections

Our Security Alliance continued to grow this month as NUS, NRI Secure and the chairman of the Singapore Blockchain Technical Committee agreed to join.

With a mission to support the healthy growth and adoption of blockchain applications by encouraging and facilitating secure smart contract development, we’re confident each of these new members will help us get closer to that goal.

If you’re a security company interested in pushing forward the standard of blockchain technology, we invite you to join the Smart Contract Security Alliance.

Still want more?

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