December 8, 2017, BSafe.network (Revision April 21, 2018)
Nowadays, many cryptocurrency projects and blockchain based projects are becoming reality, and there are a large number of technologies and implementations. The development of theory and technology to make blockchains mature enough for actual applications is important if we are to provide a foundation for building upon, much like what happened with the Internet itself. Scaling Bitcoin and other academic conferences are the places to find the future progress of blockchain technology. In addition to such conferences, we need a place to provide scientific evidence to evaluate and compare blockchain technologies. This evidence is not limited to performance, but also security, privacy, game theory, economics, and regulation. BSafe.network is the neutral academic research test network by international universities with 24 universities currently participating. BSafe.network plans to hold a series of open technology competitions on many aspects of blockchain technologies. The aims of the open competition are:
Currently, “layer 2 technology for blockchain” is a category of technology to enhance blockchain based transactions by connecting the decentralized nature of blockchain and actual applications by segregating a huge number of transactions. There are also other types of layer 2 technology to enhance privacy. Lightning network and TumbleBit are examples of Layer 2 technologies. Because layer 2 protocols provide different trust models than blockchains, there may be trade-offs among performance, security, privacy and so on. This competition aims to have deep and scientific knowledge of designing and evaluating layer 2 technology to facilitate further research and development of layer 2 technology.
The goals of this competition are
This competition does not aim to select some technologies as standards or candidates of standards. It aims to provide public academia backed data and research results. Outcomes to the public are as follows.
As byproducts of this competition, we can provide public security testing theory and tools for Layer 2 technologies.
At the first competition, we conduct the competition for evaluation technology.
We call for technology evaluation methodology and software for layer 2 technology. They include common datasets for evaluation. Please refer to section 4 for evaluation criteria to be considered.
In this competition, we evaluate each proposal in two ways; theoretical evaluation and experimental evaluation. Theoretical evaluation is reviewing submitted technical documents by university researchers through a scientific review process. Experimental evaluation is performing experiments for each submission using BSafe.network isolated research test network by installing submitted software and running each blockchain network for three months, with evaluation datasets. Experiments include not only performance evaluation but also security evaluation and attacks performed by university researchers.
Supposed evaluation metrics include but not limited to
1) Performance
a) Number of transactions/sec
b) Network latency
2)Security/Trust
a) Resistance to fault/crash/attack to nodes
b) Degree of decentralization
c) Resistance to DoS attack to make layer 2 transactions fail
d) Scenario and data set to evaluate
e) Availability of layer 2 nodes
3)Privacy/Fungibility
a) Correlation among transactions
b) Unlinkability among transactions
c) Unlinkability to identity
Anyone can submit a proposal to this competition, but need to meet the following procedure and submission requirements. Each submitter must submit the following.
A sample of application document.
All submitters need to carefully submit the program code to avoid security vulnerabilities and bugs. Before running software over BSafe.network, we will conduct the security analysis and source code check. If we found any major problem in the code, the proposal is not considered for the competition. If the evaluating committee judges that the technical documents do not contain enough information and data for theoretical evaluation, the proposal is not considered for the competition. Note that no code changes are allowed after submission.
We are planning to award a winner and excellent proposals “B-Prize” with certain amount of money. Details will be announced when it is decided.
The layer 2 technology competition focuses on providing technical knowledge to help further research and development. The result does not endorse anything about other aspects including soundness of business, exchange rates of cryptocurrencies and tokens. To preserve business neutrality, we do not evaluate any proposal with existing/upcoming plans of ICO or selling tokens.
Other committee members will be added after confirmation.
E-mail: layer2.competition@bsafe.network
Website: http://bsafe.network
BSafe.network is an international and neutral research test network for blockchain technology. It plays a similar role as what NSFNET and BSD did for the development of the internet technology, for blockchain technology. The network consists of international universities to preserve neutrality, and as of December 8, 24 universities from North America, Europe, Asia and Africa are a part of BSafe.network.