The Internet of Blockchain: Cosmos & Polkadot

You will be able to watch the meetup livestream here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsNh6ePeuX8).

With blockchain technology rapidly gaining adoption for enterprise applications and public networks like Ethereum and Bitcoin maturing, mainstream applications still haven't arrived. Key challenges that need to be resolved is how applications can reach true scale and how different blockchains can interoperate. Recently an exciting vision for a true internet of blockchain has emerged driven by the Cosmos and Polkadot projects.

Cosmos: Internet of Blockchain - Jae Kwon

With countless blockchains, both public and private in existence, interoperability remains an unsolved problem. Assets on one blockchain generally can't be moved to other chains and exchanging assets on different blockchains requires going through a centralized intermediary. The Cosmos (http://cosmos.network) project aims to change that by creating an internet of blockchain that connects different chains through the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol. Interoperability is achieved through the shared Cosmos Hub, powered by the Tendermint (http://tendermint.com/) consensus protocol, that keeps track of the number of tokens in each connected chains and manages transfers between them.

Polkadot: An Overview - Dr Gavin Wood

Present-day blockchain architectures all suffer from a number of issues not least practical means of extensibility and scalability. We believe this stems from tying two very important parts of the consensus architecture, namely canonicality and validity, too closely together. This talk introduces an architecture, the heterogeneous multi-chain, which fundamentally sets the two apart. Along these, the session will also addressed Scalability through a divide-and-conquer approach to these two functions, scaling out of its bonded core through the incentivisation of untrusted public nodes. The Polkadot whitepaper and website are available here (http://polkadot.io/).

Jae Kwon is the founder and CEO of Tendermint, which has been building the leading proof-of-stake consensus protocol since 2014. Tendermint is widely used for permissioned chains including in Monax (http://monax.io/)'s ErisDB platform and newly as an option for consortium chains with the Parity (https://ethcore.io/parity.html) Ethereum client. He was previously a developer at Yelp and Alexa and studied Computer Science at Cornell University.

Dr. Gavin Wood was the co-founder and CTO of Ethereum (https://ethereum.org/) and now heads Parity Technologies Ltd (http://ethcore.io/), developer of the Parity client (https://ethcore.io/parity.html). He coded Ethereum's first functional implementation, wrote the Yellow Paper (http://paper.gavwood.com/) (first formal specification of a blockchain protocol) and invented the Solidity language (http://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). Gavin studied software engineering at University of York (https://www.linkedin.com/company/university-of-york) and holds lifelong interest in game theory.