Please note: This seminar will take place in DC 1304.
Victor Luchangco
Principal Algorithms Researcher, Algorand
The Algorand blockchain is a fast pure proof-of-stake blockchain with native (“layer 1”) support for atomic transactions, user-defined assets, and smart contracts. Layer-1 smart contracts are tightly constrained in both storage and execution to ensure that they do not unduly impact the overall performance of the blockchain. To accommodate applications with greater storage and computation requirements, we propose speculative smart contracts, which maintain storage and execute contract calls off-chain and issue “effects transactions” that summarize the effects of the calls on the blockchain itself.
In this talk, we describe how to implement speculative smart contracts, and the features of the Algorand blockchain that we exploit, and some extensions that are required, to do so.
Bio: Victor Luchangco is a Principal Algorithms Researcher at Algorand, where he works on protocols and languages for blockchains. He is a co-author of The Art of Multiprocessor Programming, and is a recipient of the 2022 Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing. Before joining Algorand, he worked at Oracle Labs and Sun Labs on concurrent algorithms and data structures for shared-memory multiprocessors and the Fortress programming language.
He has authored over 50 papers and holds more than 50 patents. He received an Sc.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a dissertation on models for weakly consistent memories.
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