817/5000 The center was opened in Darmstadt with the opening symposium "Can The World Run on Blockchains? The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly ". State Secretary Patrick Burghardt from the Hessian Ministry of Science and the Arts gave the welcome.

Core topics of the discussions were the future usability and the novel applications of the blockchain technology for various economic and industrial sectors as well as for private users. In their lectures, the speakers dealt extensively with the importance of the security of digital currencies and confidence in them. Dr. Martin Diehl of the Deutsche Bundesbank, for example, mentioned that unlike other currencies, the cryptocurrency is not physically tangible and therefore not "real" for many.

All experts agreed that Blockchain technology is an unstoppable and extremely exciting technology that will continue to reach many sectors of the economy in the future. After the great media hype around Blockchain is already over, it is now possible to research the topic in a meaningful way, according to the tenor of the podium discussion on Thursday evening.

Ethereum Foundation Promotes Blockchain Security Research with a Research Grant

Ethereum is Bitcoin's second-largest cryptocurrency based on blockchain technology. The associated Ethereum Foundation awards the funding to research projects that want to improve the platform and the underlying technologies. In the Perun project, Darmstadt researchers are working on the scalability of the Ethereum Blockchain - so far, all transactions are handled directly on the Blockchain to ensure complete security and traceability. However, this can make the processing of transactions very slow and expensive. Prof. Sebastian Faust explains: "It's like buying a chocolate bar in the supermarket, but the transaction fees are so high that it suddenly costs € 51.50 instead of € 1.50 - and you have to wait another 10 minutes to reach that the payment is settled. This is not practical. "The researchers are therefore working on a system that allows transactions to be processed outside the blockchain to save costs and time. This even enables microtransactions in the cent range, without compromising security.

The Researchproject „Perun“ within the Center for Secure Distributed Ledgers and Contracts was awarded a Ethereum Foundation Grant of $250.000. Using this new technology, blockchain-based systems can process millions of transactions in real time at minimal cost. The majority of transactions are handled outside of the blockchain, which can significantly improve scalability, which is one of the key problems of blockchain systems. At the same time, the newly developed systems must also ensure "a high degree of safety," as Prof. Sebastian Faust explains. This is particularly important as attacks on a faulty system can easily lead to damage in the high millions.

In addition to accelerating payments, Perun technology also supports more complex smart contracts without the involvement of a blockchain. These are programs that can execute cash payments controlled by the program code. This makes it possible to implement new applications, for example in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment, for which the blockchain systems are currently too slow and too expensive.

Perun is a research cooperation with Prof. Stefan Dziembowski of the University of Warsaw. The researchers work together with Robert Bosch GmbH and Brainbot AG, who, as strategic industrial partners, want to implement the solutions developed in a joint open source project.