Concordium #6 2020 - Incentivized Testnet Coming Soon!

Concordium Community Newsletter - Covering October 2020

General

• Incentivized Testnet will be released on October the 15th, 2020

  Are you ready to earn some GTU?

  After two successful testnets, we are ready to release our first incentivized testnet. Participants  will be able to earn rewards for performing different challenges, starting from October 15th until 26th of November. Rewards will be transferred in GTUs after the Mainnet goes live. 

  Among the challenges, users will run nodes on the Concordium network, contribute as bakers, create identities and accounts using different environments, try to cheat the system with invalid ID documents, make and bulk shielded and unshielded transactions, and many more. By completing the challenges, node operators, developers, and community members can receive rewards. Up to a total of  10,000,000 GTU will be distributed among the participants for helping secure, sustain, and grow Concordium Network and the ecosystem. 
  
  You will be able to discover the challenges next week on a dedicated Github Public Repository. Join our social media channels and don’t miss the release. Twitter |Telegram  | Discord  | Medium  | Linkedin  | Youtube  | Reddit  | Weibo

• Concordium listed as one of the Top 50 Blockchain Companies in the Crypto Valley
  
  Concordium is proud to be listed by the CV VC as one of the Top 50 Blockchain Technology organizations in the Crypto Valley. You can check the report here. 

DEV

We are glad to announce that Testnet 3 is going to be released next week, and it will be followed by an incentivized program as explained above. that will be launched on October the 15th, 2020.  This third iteration will include among other cool stuff:

• iOS Concordium ID app available

• Bulletproofs. The core blockchain has been updated to support use of bulletproofs

• Encrypted(shielded) amounts and transfers. Support for shielded transactions has been added to the core blockchain. Support for sending and receiving shielded amounts are added to the mobile apps and the Concordium client

• Anonymity revocation tool available for anonymity revokers

• Block storage improvements for storing the chain on nodes

• Added import to app. It is now possible to import a file that has previously been exported. This enables moving identities and accounts to other mobile devices and restoring from backup

• Chain visualization: The connection of blocks has been made more stable to ensure that it progresses smoothly

• µGTU. The smallest unit has been changed from 10-4 to 10-6 

  Participate and join us on the creation of the new next-gen blockchain.  Join our Telegram and Discord to be up to date with all the announcements

Research and Events

• COBRA at the18th International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS)
  Concordium Blockchain Research Center Aarhus is in constant research to develop new protocols for efficient and secure consensus algorithms, sharding mechanisms, new cryptographic techniques, and more. On October 20th,  COBRA researchers Dominic Deuber, Nico Döttling, Bernardo Magri, Giulio Malavolta and Sri Aravinda Krishnan Thyagarajan will present their paper Minting Mechanism for Proof of Stake at the ACNS 2020. 
  
  ACNS is an annual conference focusing on current developments that advance the areas of applied cryptography and its application to systems and network security. With a very competitive paper acceptance rate, their goal is to represent both academic research works as well as developments in industrial and technical frontiers.

• COBRA at the High-Assurance Crypto Software Workshop (HACS)

  Bas Spitters and Diego Aranha gave a presentation at the HACS  workshop, an exclusive invitation-only event with experts on high assurance cryptographic implementations from academia and industry (including Google, Amazon, Mozilla, Signal).

• COBRA at Eurocrypt 2020 
  COBRA’s PhD-student Luisa Siniscalchi and collaborators, have published the paper How to Extract Useful Randomness from Unreliable Sources  in Eurocrypt 2020.
  Eurocrypt 2020 is the 39th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques. Eurocrypt is one of the three flagship conferences of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). 

• COBRA’s analysis on the bZx Hack

  As part of the efforts at the Blockchain Academy Network, Bas Spitters and research assistant Mikkel Milo, have analyzed the recent 8M$ hack of the bZx decentralized finance system. Manual auditors missed the vulnerability. However, the COBRA ConCert verification framework includes automatic testing and was able to find the vulnerability quickly. An article is forthcoming.

Press and Content

• Cointelegraph - A new enterprise blockchain features private real-life identities, but not without controversy

• Coingape - Blockchain Compliance by Design: Concordium Comes Ready Made for Big Business

• Techworms - Why Enterprise Blockchain Needs a Solution to the Finality Problem

• Blockonomi - Concordium: A Privacy-oriented Public Blockchain with an Enterprise-Grade Compliance Twist

• Blockgeeks - 3 Reasons Why Blockchain Security Matters to Enterprises

• Cryptodaily  - Will Concordium Succeed Where Other Enterprise Blockchains Have Failed? 

• Crypto Potato - Why Do Bitcoin Transactions Take So Long to Become “Final” and Can It Be Fixed?

• BTC Peek - A Brand New Enterprise Blockchain Options Non-public Real-life Identities, However Not With Out Controversy

• Cointelegraph  - Digital-Cold-War-United-States-and-China-vie-for-blockchain-supremacy

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  This newsletter is curated by Team Concordium. Artwork by Team Concordium. 

  Got news or articles you would like to include? Any feedback or other suggestions? drop us a line on bi (a) concordium.com or find us on Twitter.