IMDEA Software and the Tezos Ecosystem
Tezos is the open-source platform for blockchain assets and applications that is changing innovation in the social, political and economic framework on a global scale.
The IMDEA Software Institute joins the Tezos Community with the collaboration agreement signed with and Nomadic Labs, an active member of the ecosystem. Nomadic Labs has ample expertise in research and development of distributed, decentralised, and formally verified software, and is a preferent partner of the Tezos Foundation.
Research
The collaboration of the IMDEA Software Institute with the Tezos ecosystem focuses, primarily but non exclusively, on the lines below.
Program Analysis & Verification for Safety
The Institute will provide advances in the theoretical underpinnings and practical tools that help programmers rigorously prove that the software executes as intended in terms of safety properties. This is extremely relevant in order to ensure ahead of time that, for example, the underlying blockchain infrastructure is dependable and reliable and that smart contracts execute as intended.
Distributed Consensus
Consensus is placed at the core of blockchain technology and is key to the practical usefulness and decentralization of the blockchain. The Institute actively works in the design and correctness proofs of fault-tolerant consensus algorithms that are scalable and viable resource-wise.
Resource Consumption and Performance
The amount of resources spent by some blockchains and the speed at which they can process transactions are weak points of this technologies. Some of our IMDEA researchers work in automatically determining resource consumption of smart contracts ahead of their execution and on implementation technologies to make it possible unprecedented speeds in transaction processing.
Security and Privacy
A growing preoccupation in blockchain technologies is how to ensure that the distributed ledger can be used as a witness of a transaction without unnecessarily revealing private data. The Institute actively works on fundamental technologies, such as zero-knowledge proofs, that are being widely adopted as a solution to this problem.
Collaboration
As shown above, the research lines of the IMDEA Software Institute are a perfect tandem to meet the needs of the ecosystem and contribute to the development of Tezos technology.
The triangular alliance between the Tezos Foundation, Nomadic Labs and the IMDEA Software Institute will contribute to the expansion of the technology and address the key barriers facing blockchain adoption to date: smart contract safety, long-term upgradability, and open participation.
