 We're incredibly proud to be here today at UCSB, the University of California Santa Barbara. It's quite a nice campus, it's got a great history, there's a lot of wonderful people here. We're presenting several papers at Crypto 17 and it's a major event, it's usually held here and the conference covers the state of the art in cryptography, everything from quantum cryptography to block ciphers to stream ciphers to multi-party computation protocols, and more recently they've started having a dedicated section on Bitcoin and blockchain technology. So Urobot is the first POS based blockchain protocol that has been accepted into a top cryptographic conference. So this means that the paper and the protocol described in the paper has been through an exhaustive process of peer review where several experts in cryptographic protocols have looked at the protocol and made sure that it is indeed secure and that the arguments showing that it is secure are valid. So good research requires you to have good research principles. You have to follow certain methodologies, you have to have a large degree of intellectual honesty, you have to accept that sometimes the world doesn't work in the way you want it to be. And so part of good research with a cryptographic protocol is you have to have principles with that research. You have to say well what are the foundations we're going to live on and we have to live within those restrictions, even if those restrictions are hard. Now that doesn't mean you can't build useful protocols, but it does mean that you have to iterate in a very organic way. So instead of trying to publish a paper saying we've solved sharding and privacy and we have a high transaction throughput, we have all these great properties, oh but by the way we don't know if it's secure or not, you say we start with the principles that it always must be secure and always must adhere to the basic things like liveness and persistence that we've laid out in the beginning and over time you have a thousand small steps that allow you to build up to organic iteration with principles that ends with a great protocol. You sacrifice nothing but it ends up being very effective and very powerful and it stands to the test of time. Basically when you design a cryptographic protocol and you write a paper describing the theoretical description of this protocol and a theoretical proof, you have a guarantee that whatever you have designed on an ideal world is secure, but when you actually implement cryptographic protocols many problems can happen and in most cases the actual implementation does not reflect the theoretical design. Think of this as going from an architectural project to a real building. When you do that engineers have to come forward to make sure that the physical structure is going to hold and that it's going to look like the architectural project. That's more or less what happens when we go from a theoretical cryptographic protocol description to an implementation that's going to be used in the real world. How do you prevent things from going bad? You need to make sure that your implementation of the protocol reflects exactly what was in the theoretical paper. In order to do that you need to come up with a formal description of the theoretical paper that can be easily turned into code that's going to be executed. Well, once you have a formal description of the protocol and you turn that into code, that code is being generated by humans so you still might make mistakes. So techniques have been developed to verify the actual code that has been produced against the formal verification that has been produced and make sure that they match. This is a painstaking work of writing both the formal verification from the theoretical description of the paper and writing the code and checking that everything works. But it's very interesting that in Uroboros steps are being taken to produce a proper formal verification of the protocol for implementation and to go towards fully automated verification of the implementation that is being made. This is going to bring us to the next level of security in allowing us to show to anybody who is interested that the implementation actually matches the protocol that has been proven secure. The great part about coming here is you, in a very small intimate setting, get to meet some of the world's top cryptographers. Just this year in attendance there's Dan Bonnet, Dan Bernstein, John Katz and many others who are literally the pioneers and founders of many of the innovations we take for granted in the cryptographic space. They're still around, they're still publishing and it's great to actually have a chance to interact with them and talk with them and learn from them and see what we're the spaces at and where we're going. As for our presentation, I believe this is the first time a proof of stake protocol has been presented at crypto and so we're incredibly excited to share the things we've discovered and come up with with our colleagues and our hope is that we can continue to contribute to the science of cryptography as much as we do to the science of cryptocurrencies.