IOHK | Dr. Peter Gaži, presenting Ouroboros at MIT

Peter Gaži did his master studies in Computer Science at Comenius University in Bratislava, and obtained his PhD. in Cryptography from ETH Zurich under the supervision of Prof. Ueli Maurer. Later he worked as a postdoc in the Cryptography research group of Prof. Krzysztof Pietrzak at Institute of Science and Technology Austria. Currently, he is a full-time research fellow at IOHK. In this talk at MIT, Dr. Gazi explains the Ouroboros protocol and how it has the distinction of being the first proof of stake algorithm that is provably secure and has been peer reviewed at a leading cryptography conference, Crypto 2017. For an infrastructure that must be relied on to carry billions of dollars worth of value, this process is necessary. In addition to security, if blockchains are going to become infrastructure for new financial systems they must be able to efficiently and sustainably handle millions of users. The key to scaling up is proof of stake, a far more energy efficient and cost effective algorithm, and as such this research represents a significant step forward in cryptography.