AGENDA:

10:30-11:20 Talk: Scaling up public blockchain systems

11:20-11:30 Break

11:30-12:30 Workshop: Write your first smart contract... and then make it more efficient

Workshop prerequisites:

- Basic programming experience

- A PC with internet access

Talk : Scaling up public blockchain systems

It is an undeniable fact that blockchain technology’s popularity has recently seen a wild surge. Even though this was predicted, it is still evident that most of the public blockchain systems are not ready for widespread use, since they suffer from very low capacity with respect to transactions’ processing rate (the number of transactions that can be processed per second). Hence, the matter of addressing scalability issues in blockchain systems has popped up as an issue of unprecedented urgency, since it is causing immense hindering in the widespread application of blockchain technology in multiple fields that could greatly benefit from it. The latency of transactions and the imposed high usage cost (transaction fees), that permission-less blockchain systems suffer from, usually outweigh the benefits of using them and many possible applications become irrelevant. The history of public blockchain systems is presented to highlight the origins of the scalability limitations. Both currently proposed scalability solutions and potential future approaches are discussed while the state channels approach is analyzed in detail.

Workshop: Write your first smart contract... and then make it more efficient

Participants are going to be presented with basic web3 tooling and will be given the opportunity to write their first simple smart contract. Consequently they will be guided to adapt the developed smart contract, according to the state channels scheme, in order to make it more efficient.

Georgios P. Spathoulas holds a Phd from the Department of Digital Systems of University of Piraeus since 2013. He is a member of Laboratory Teaching Staff of the Department of Computer Science and Biomedical Informatics of University of Thessaly since 2014 and he teaches in both undergraduate and postgraduate study programs of the Department. He is also a postdoctoral researcher, with the Critical Infrastructures Security and Resilience group in NTNU CCIS. His research interests are related to network security, privacy preserving techniques and blockchain technology. He is the co-author of more than 30 publications in peer reviewed journals and conference proceedings. He has also served as Program Committee member in international conferences and he has taken part in both national and international research programs.