Dr. Ed Felten and Offchain Labs: Second Layer Solutions for Smart Contracts

QuantLayer Podcast

Dr. Ed Felten is a professor of Computer Science at Princeton, he’s served as Chief Technologist at the FTC and Deputy CTO at the White House. He’s also the cofounder of Offchain Labs, a Princeton-based startup that’s focusing on 2nd layer smart contract solutions to improve scalability. This was one of our favorite conversations to date. We discuss smart contracts and their current problems. We discuss Arbitrum, Offchain Labs’ solution to the smart contract scaling problem which uses a system of validators to provide a guarantee to smart contract participants. Moreover, we discuss at length how their AnyTrust guarantee works, and why only a single validator is needed to maintain a working system. We also go through how an existing dApp can get ported over to Arbitrum. Finally, we talk high level tech themes: How technology and public policy are becoming more and more interconnected, how technology advising will become more and more important over time, and other technologies he’s really optimistic about. It’s a really packed episode. Enjoy.

Topics:

On the idea of "Bitcoin works in practice, but not in theory" Smart contracts Primary problems with smart contracts Real world applications of smart contracts What Offchain Labs is doing with smart contracts Arbitrum & Validators Porting Existing dApp to Arbitrum Offchain business model On blockchain Academia to Industry Advisor to Obama Administraion On his co-authored paper titled, "A Cryptographic Escrow for Treaty Declarations and Step-by-Step Verification" Optimistic technologies people don't know about

Links:

Coursera course: - https://www.coursera.org/learn/cryptocurrency - http://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs27philippe.pdf Github: https://github.com/OffchainLabs Whitepaper: https://offchainlabs.com/arbitrum.pdf Twitter: https://twitter.com/EdFelten Princeton website: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~felten/