Fractal and Crypto

Blockchain Thinking

The Brain as a Decentralized Autonomous Corporation

The evolution of the world of energy towards a system of decentralized production and consumption
assets makes it possible to understand better the upcoming industrial revolution, which will be one of
distributed information flows.

A new paradigm, the “blockchain”, enables economic actors to completely decentralize information
flows without intermediaries. Even though many technological locks still exist today, it becomes possible
already today to imagine that each machine or connected object will be able to communicate
autonomously and securely with others, learn and enrich its mode of operation thanks to artificial
intelligence technologies.

The business models will be strongly impacted by a greater flexibility of the manufacturing capacities,
their adaptation in real time to consumer constraints and the optimization of supply management (raw
material, energy and components) through smart purchase, onsite production, 3D-printing and smart
logistics: a fractal production with shorter supply channels steered by resources and energy efficiency
data.

Fractal: A New Paradigm for High-Performance Proof-of-Stake Blockchains

The phenomenal successes of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have demonstrated the
exciting promise of blockchain in powering a new decentralized economy. Yet, the current technologies
exhibit many limitations, from the huge energy waste to the unsatisfying performance.

In this talk, we will give a brief overview of the celebrated Bitcoin's proof-of-work (PoW) protocol, and,
then, Fractal's completely new blockchain design from networking to consensus layers, to deliver the
first large-scale, high-performance, and provably-secure proof-of-stake (PoS) protocol.

Our latest benchmark indicates that our cross-layer design can scale to 10,000+ nodes across the globe,
and, under a modest bandwidth limit of 20 Mbps, sustains a stellar throughput of 3,000+ tps. The first
part of the talk will focus on our new consensus protocol, called ?iChing", a pure PoS protocol that is
much more energy- efficient. On one hand, iChing's design closely mimics Bitcoin, the only blockchain
that stands the test of time for being secure, decentralized (scale to 10,000+ nodes), and irreversible. On
the other hand,"iChing" through rigorous yet practical cryptographic design, addresses notorious
security challenges in PoS such as nothing-at- stake and grinding attacks.

The second part of the talk will present "BackPacker" our systematical redesign of peer-to-peer network
to make permissionless and anonymous communication in the network more robust and fairer.
Moreover, "BackPacke" presents a new philosophy in separating application data (e.g. transaction
information) from consensus data (order of transactions) to substantially reduce the disparity among
the participating nodes. Through rigorous proofs and real-world benchmark, we show that "BackPacker"
achieves both optimal block propagation time as well as near-optimal throughput (80% of the network-
physical-limit).
Finally, we will also discuss Fractal's perspective on important topics including effective governance and
building decentralized applications. Some results in this talk are based on my joint work with Thang
Dinh, Lei Fan, Jonathan Katz, and Phuc Thai.