david wong

Hey! I'm David, cofounder of zkSecurity and the author of the Real-World Cryptography book. I was previously a crypto architect at O(1) Labs (working on the Mina cryptocurrency), before that I was the security lead for Diem (formerly Libra) at Novi (Facebook), and a security consultant for the Cryptography Services of NCC Group. This is my blog about cryptography and security and other related topics that I find interesting.

Algorand's cryptographic sortition posted September 2019

There are several cryptocurrencies that are doing really interesting things, Algorand is one of them. Their breakthrough was to make a leader-based BFT algorithm work in a permissionless setting (and I believe they are the first ones who managed to do this). At the center of their system lies a cryptography sortition algorithm. It's quite interesting, so I made a video to explain it!

PS: I've been doing these videos for a while, and I still don't have a cool intro, so if you want to make me a cool intro please do :D

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Comments

Josh Lee

Hey David, is there any change that you can use Algorand technology at FB or Libra at some point? Thanks!

david

Libra is permissioned (smaller set of validators) so it wouldn't make sense to use this algorithm : o

John Lee

Well now, Algorand has enabled the opportunity to build permissioned environments using Co-Chains and have full control of the validators, here is a paper published by Silvio Micali recently: https://www.algorand.com/resources/blog/algorand-co-chains,

Jake

Informative video. Was confused on one thing - the block proposal with the lowest VRF hash is the single block that goes to the Certification Vote. You kept saying the biggest. Believe it's the lowest. Thanks again for helpful video.
https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-details/algorand_consensus/

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