Reflections on the Past, Present and Future of Blockchain Foundations and Applications (Invited Talk)

Abstract

We survey some of the amazing progress in Blockchain technology in the last 5 years: from foundations like consensus protocols, execution models, and zero-knowledge proofs, to why these foundations are critical for applications like decentralized finance and web3. The main part of the talk will try to envision the future of Blockchains: how will the "Endgame" look like? What foundations are we still missing? We argue that for Blockchains to thrive and reach Billions of users, we should expect a much more regulated landscape to emerge and discuss some exciting opportunities in reg-crypto and RegDeFi. An example of this direction is our new work on UTT which is a decentralized Ecash system with accountable privacy.