CTO of Informal Systems, Sean Braithwaite, talks about the development of IBC in Rust, making it portable across state machines and network architectures, including Substrate.
Co-Founder of Cosmos and CEO of Informal Systems, Ethan Buchman sits down with Billy Rennekamp, Grants Manager at the Interchain Foundation for a chat on the state of the Cosmos, including path to IBC launch in 2021 and beyond.
Zarko Milosevic, Chief Scientist at Informal Systems talks about how decentralized ecosystems work best when the projects work together. In essence, updating and securing each other is the best way to organize each other.
Andrey Kuprianov, Senior Research Engineer at Informal discusses how we integrate model-based testing into the development workflow, ensuring higher software quality, while simultaneously making deep testing accessible and more fun for developers
Igor Konnov, Principal Scientist at Informal talks about our Verification-Driven Development approach at Informal and our work to specify the Tendermint Light Client in English and TLA+. We show how TLA+ and Apalache helped us in understanding the protocol better. Importantly, the TLA+ specification and the model checking efforts enable model-based testing of the protocol implementations.
COO of Informal Systems, Arianne Flemming talks about the changing operational landscape and how blockchain startups can manage their investments to benefit their company in a secure, flexible, and compliant way while ensuring they don’t run out of money.
Arianne Flemming, COO at Informal Systems, talks about the next evolution of company management involving distributed organizations, funds, and social cohesion.
CEO of Informal Systems and co-founder of Cosmos, Ethan Buchman, talks about the history of central banking and the lessons the cryptocurrency and blockchain community can draw from a long history of centralized finance.
Operations Manager at Informal Systems, Jelena Djuric, talks about what the blockchain ecosystem can learn from political and economic systemic change throughout history.
Ilina Stoilkovska, Igor Konnov, Josef Widder, and Florian Zuleger. “Eliminating Message Counters in Threshold Automata,” To appear at ATVA 2020. Read here.
The TLA+ community hosted a virtual event to bring together practitioners and researchers to discuss the latest developments in TL+. Andrey Kuprianov, Research Engineer at Informal, and Igor Konnov, Principal Scientist, presented on Apalache - a symbolic model checker for TLA+. Check out the presentation, paper, and slides here.
Informal’s CEO Ethan Buchman was featured in a podcast for Fintech Impact discussing the genesis of Cosmos and his role in building out the ecosystem.
Igor Konnov, Principal Scientist at Informal Systems, is the co-chair of CONCUR 2020, during QONFEST, a leading conference for formal verification enthusiasts.
Informal is a Gold Sponsor for this year’s RustConf2020. We are big fans of Rust, and have ongoing Rust projects including the Tendermint protocol and the InterBlockchain Communication (IBC) Protocol.
This marks Informal System’s second newsletter where we share updates with the community on what we’ve been up to over the past few months. We discuss what we are working on, including the tools we are developing for formal verification, and their use on Cosmos protocols and software. Enjoy!
AT FMBC, the 2nd Workshop on Formal Methods for Blockchains, we presented a paper titled, “Formal Specifications and Model Checking of the Tendermint Blockchain Synchronization Protocol”. In this presentation, Chief Scientist, Zarko Milosevic, gives a great overview of the paper.
Ethan Buchman, CEO at Informal Systems, discusses how in its current form, decentralized finance (DeFi) carries some inherent risk to average users.
Ethan Buchman, CEO at Informal Systems, joined Hashing It Out to discuss Informal’s unique approach to formal verification of reliable distributed systems. He reflects on some of the fundamental security challenges with building protocols, including Tendermint in Go.
Sean Braithwaite, CTO at Informal Systems, presented on the “Essentialism of Light Clients”. He discussed Informal’s work on building out the Tendermint Light Client in Rust. You can watch Sean Braithwaite’s presentation on the Tendermint Light Client here (starting at 3:33:12).
In this op-ed, Informal CEO Ethan Buchman, discusses how open technological infrastructure would enable a sustainable monetary system to flourish.
As part of his PhD thesis at EPFL, Informal Research Engineer, Adi Seredinschi, had his work presented at the 2020 International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks. His research explored efficient solutions for online payments, titled “Online Payments by Merely Broadcasting Messages.
DISCOTEC is an academic conference on Distributed Computing Techniques. Principal Scientist, Igor Konnov, gave a tutorial on the Byzantine Model Checker.
The Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol, Tendermint Core, and the Cosmos SDK serve as the foundational building blocks for a successful interoperable blockchain ecosystem. Read more on the latest organizations joining the ranks of Cosmos community leaders and the recent grants from the Interchain Foundation.
Igor Konnov, Marijana Lazic, Ilina Stoilkovska, and Josef Widder. “Tutorial: Parameterized Verification with Byzantine Model Checker,” in FORTE, pages 189–207, 2020. Source here
Informal CEO, Ethan Buchman, presented a technical progress update and roadmap for Cosmos and an update on InterChain Foundation treasury management.
Hello World! This is Informal’s inaugural newsletter. In this update, we share what we’re working on, including the specification of Cosmos protocols in TLA+ and implementing them in Rust. Check out what’s in store for the team, what we’re reading, and more!
Informal hosted a webinar alongside Penrose Partners on the topic of the Past, Present and Future of the Financial Systems: Enabling transformations with blockchains. The webinar focused on how macro events like COVID-19 accelerate the transformation of the global financial system. You can watch the webinar on Informal Systems’ Youtube channel here.
Daniel Collins, Rachid Guerraoui, Jovan Komatovic, Matteo Monti, Athanasios Xygkis, Matej Pavlovic, Petr Kuznetsov, Yvonne-Anne Pig- nolet, Dragos-Adrian Seredinschi, and Andrei Tonkikh. “Online Payments by Merely Broadcasting Messages,” in DSN, 2020. Source here
Informal’s CEO Ethan Buchman was featured in Crypto Briefing discussing Informal Systems and our slow and steady open-source philosophy. He discusses how the traditional “move fast and break things” mentality is catching up to us in the context of growth and data privacy.
Ethan Buchman, CEO of Informal Systems, did an interview with NASDAQ discussing Cosmos, local currencies, Proof of Stake, and the future of finance.
Nathalie Bertrand, Igor Konnov, Marijana Lazi ́c, and Josef Widder. “Verification of randomized consensus algorithms under round-rigid adver- saries,” Invited Submission to International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer. Source here.
Blockchain synchronization is one of the core protocols of Tendermint blockchains. In this short paper, we discuss our recent efforts in formal specification of the protocol and its implementation, as well as some initial model checking results. We demonstrate that the protocol quality and understanding can be improved by writing specifications and model checking them. By: Sean Braithwaite, Igor Konnov, Ilina Stoilkovska, Anca Zamfir, Ethan Buchman, Zarko Milosevic, and Josef Widder.
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