Proto Labs, Filecoin Foundation, Electric Coin.Co And Ethereum Foundation Integrates For One Goal

Electric Coin Co. (ECC) has entered into an agreement with Protocol Labs, the Filecoin Foundation, and the Ethereum Foundation to explore Halo R&D, including how the technology might be used in their respective ecosystems. Filecoin is an open-source cloud-storage marketplace, protocol, and cryptocurrency; and Ethereum Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting Ethereum and related technologies.

“The result of this partnership could be that Filecoin uses Halo 2 to increase scalability. These are the kinds of ideas we’ll work on. Beyond that, it could improve interoperability between Filecoin, Zcash, and Ethereum; and it could open up avenues for greater privacy across all of these projects.”— ECC’s Josh Swihart, VP Growth

The Groups Will Explore The Following Projects:

• Implementation of recursion in the Halo 2 proving system. Halo 2 itself is foundational to ECC’s scalability initiative for Zcash, since recursion enables options such as transaction aggregation and succinct blockchains. Recursion also potentially enables novel zero-knowledge technologies such as a “zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine.”
• Potential integration of Halo 2 into the Filecoin proof system. The primary benefit of a possible Halo 2 integration into Filecoin would be scalability so that large numbers of users can interact with the platform inexpensively and efficiently. By leveraging recursion in Halo 2, the amount of proof data stored on-chain in Filecoin can be significantly reduced.
• Implementation of a Halo 2 proof for the efficient Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) being developed. A VDF is a cryptographic primitive that has many potential use cases. It can be used as a source of general purpose randomness including use in smart contract applications as well as leader election in Proof of Stake consensus protocols.

ECC, the Filecoin Foundation, Protocol Labs, and the Ethereum Foundation will also be working with SupraNational, a vendor specializing in hardware-accelerated cryptography, for potential GPU and ASIC design and development of the VDF.

ABOUT Zcash
Zcash is a decentralized peer-to-peer cryptocurrency. It was created as a fork of Bitcoin and quite like bitcoin it also has a hard limit of 21 million coins. Zcash offers complete and total privacy for their users through the use of some ingenious cryptography.

ABOUT FILECOIN
Filecoin is an open-source cloud storage marketplace, protocol, and cryptocurrency.

ABOUT ETHEREUM FOUNDATION
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting Ethereum and related technologies. The EF is not a company, or even a traditional non-profit. Their role is not to control or lead Ethereum, nor are they the only organization that funds critical development of Ethereum-related technologies. The EF is one part of a much larger ecosystem

ABOUT Protocol Labs
Protocol Labs is an open-source R&D lab. We build protocols, tools, and services to radically improve the internet. Our products serve thousands of organizations and millions of people.

RESOURCES
Electric Coin Blog