A couple of weeks back we were lucky enough to attend a blockchain workshop in Berlin organised by Binary District, a collaborative technology community. They organise events where community members come together to discuss the latest trends in new technologies and disruptive innovation.
We were there on behalf of OAX Foundation and able to represent their project in the conversations that took place. As you know, Enuma Technologies is the main developer on the OAX project and is helping apply blockchain technology in OAX’s decentralized exchange platform.
The event we went to focused on some of the latest ideas for a scaling solution for digital assets and was organized by Dr Patrick McCorry. He’s part of the team behind Sprites, the state channel technology that has the potential to bring industry-leading speed, high transaction volume and low cost to digital asset trading on the OAX platform.
One of the main topics debated during the workshop was how to reduce on-chain interactions by, for instance, avoiding the on-chain creation of a state channel application contract unless it’s required for a dispute. Another area of focus was routing for payment channels, and we saw two examples of routing algorithms specifically designed for payment channel networks.
On the practical side, we learnt a lot hearing about the experiences different development teams have been having with Lightning implementations, as well as updates from the Raiden development team. We also saw what is arguably the first production implementation of generic state channels from FunFair, a blockchain-focused gaming technology company.
In the off-chain ecosystem there are a number of research groups pursuing similar directions and it was great to finally have most of the groups gathered in one place to collaborate and exchange ideas. Hopefully this will also serve as a stepping stone towards standardizing some of the concepts that are important in the off-chain world. The workshop brought together the most prominent researchers and engineers working on state channels, and we were proud to be participating on behalf of OAX Foundation.
One of the best aspects of the two-day workshop was finally meeting Patrick alongside Surya Bakshi, a co-author of the PISA research that addresses the offline problem with state channels. Having been so focused recently on applying Sprites to the OAX project, it was great to finally meet them in person.
If you’d like to learn more about the workshop and see some of the highlights, feel free to watch videos of the conference talks and panel discussions on Binary District’s YouTube channel.
