 We gathered here at PlutusFest in December here at the University of Edebra. It's a great event that celebrates all the work we've done in smart contract research during 2018. Also a great opportunity for members of IOSK Research and the IOSK Development and Engineering team to come together and discuss not only things related to smart contract development, but also all the other research streams that we pursue at IOSK. Yes, so incentive and delegations is one of the major research efforts that we did within 2018. There is something that we've worked very intently into different parallel threads. On the one side what we were looking is that is it possible to decouple the protocol participation component in a protocol, in a protocol for stake protocol like Uroboros, with the stake holding part of the protocol which for instance involves a lot of end users that may not necessarily want to participate in the protocol. And this can be achieved via delegation, which is something that we invested a lot of research effort in 2018. And I'm very happy that we have reached a very, very good level now of a polished product that we're going to be releasing soon both in terms of a white paper, but as well as folding into Cardano. And this is something that we expect to happen very soon in 2019 and beginning of the year perhaps by the end of Q1. At the same time, the second parallel thread that investigates this is once you delegate what form would the delegation take in the blockchain. This is particularly critical. The reason is that once delegation is basically free and everybody can assign their stake to someone else what could happen conceivably in a worst case scenario is that everybody delegates to one, so the system becomes centralized. And in fact, we've seen in blockchain systems that existing blockchain incentive mechanisms can actually have such centralization tendencies. You can see it for example in the way Bitcoin operates, where there's just a few mining pools that are responsible for the whole Bitcoin ecosystem and that's certainly not a desirable feature for a decentralized system like the one that Cardano is. So basically what is important here is to design an incentive mechanism that enables delegation to operate in such a way that a natural ecosystem of multiple stake pool managers can emerge and be responsible collectively in a true decentralized fashion for the protocol. So this is something that we've put a lot of thinking in and I'm very happy that we have the white paper out. And we are now at the final stages of implementing that into Cardano production release, Shelley. So this was one of the major research thrusts in delegation incentives that we did in 2019 and very excited to see being rolled out in 2019. A new research topic that we started in 2018 and is very exciting from also technical but also applied point of view is Uroboros Kripsinus which is a protocol design which brings the Uroboros research into this privacy preserving setting. This was very exciting because privacy in blockchain systems is a very important question and it is something that still a lot of research needs to be done in order to have satisfactory systems that provide a good level of privacy. And at the same time it's very challenging from a technical point of view because somehow at the core of how a proof of stake system works you could think that it's inconsistent with privacy because by participating in the protocol itself you have to reveal some information about the stake you have in the system because that's exactly the core of how the protocol works. The proof of stake is basically a statement that one of the participants does that they are eligible to extend the ledger based on the fact that they have already some assets recorded on the ledger. So it sounds like intrinsically there is some privacy leakage that takes place during that process and that's why it's particularly challenging to develop a protocol that is capable of providing a proof of stake blockchain but at the same time do that in privacy enhancing fashion. So this is what we did or at least the first step was done and we completed Uroboros Kripsinus is the design of a proof of stake blockchain which is privacy preserving. We released this last month and this is also a research line that we will substantially be investing time within 2019 so that we can take this first protocol that we designed and continuously optimize it to the point that it will be feasible to implement it. So scalability in blockchain systems is one of the very important open questions right now. The reason is that most blockchain systems the way they operate they do not utilize the throughput that is available to the nodes that are participating the protocol in the optimal way and we can see that as it is in the basic blockchain protocols let's say that follow the Bitcoin blockchain algorithm in the way they operate you have to produce a block but you have to produce a block at regular intervals and the distance between the block production instances is essential for the security of the protocol because this provides the opportunity for nodes to converge to a unique view about what is the blockchain following the longest chain rule or the most difficult chain rule basic chain selection logic. So being capable of completely utilizing the network that is available to the nodes is a very interesting research question which we put some substantial amount of work in 2018 into. Parallel chains is a white paper we released in late 2018 and shows how is it possible to get a high performance high throughput blockchain protocols by combining basic block chains together. This is actually a very interesting operation also from a protocol design point of view because it enjoys modularity in the way you can design the final protocol. So essentially it says that you can take multiple block chains together and combine them into one unified distributed ledger that is going to enjoy the property that completely utilizes the network sources that are available to the nodes. So there's more research that is coming up in this direction which focuses on how to get a truly scalable blockchain system and this is something that it will be coming out in 2019. So side chains is another very critical component in the Cardano roadmap and also one that is going to facilitate smart contracts and also smart contracts that can operate with different programming interfaces. So one of the important aspect of side chains is the ability to transfer assets between block chains that operate in parallel but using different rules and different scripting languages as well as different mechanisms for example on how they're deployed on how they utilize different resources like the network. So being capable of transferring assets in a way which is secure from one blockchain to another is a concept that early on was held as one of the most important components for the blockchain ecosystem. So we've done in 2018 very, very significant work in this direction both in the proof-of-work space where our research was a non-interactive proof-of-work which was a work that was studying the basic component that is needed to transfer an asset from a proof-of-work blockchain to another proof-of-work blockchain but also we have done very substantial work on proof-of-stake side chains which is particularly important for Cardano and our work actually was submitted earlier in 2018 in the IEEE Security and Privacy Conference and that was accepted and will be presented within 2019. So this was another great success for our team because IEEE Security and Privacy is the top tier conference in cybersecurity and at the same time highlights the importance of designing secure side chain systems for distributed ledger technology in general. People ask me a lot why we have different Uroboros protocols. They say, well, there was this great piece of work that you did in 2017 but then there was another Uroboros version that came and what does that mean and is it something that, is it a good thing or is it something that it's something we have to worry about because a different protocol is being suddenly used which means perhaps that the old protocol there was something wrong with it. So in fact this is not the case at all. What happens here is a natural process from a research point of view of completely exploring the proof-of-stake design space. The fact of the matter is that different flavors of the protocol are more suitable for different use cases and it's very important from our point of view to completely understand all the different ways that we can fine-tune the Uroboros proof-of-stake protocol for all the use cases that could potentially the protocol can find itself useful and be deployed. So that's why for instance we have now Uroboros-Crypsinus which is a privacy-preserving proof-of-stake protocol. The core of the protocol still remains Uroboros and that's why the protocol is designed like that. So if you look at the protocol itself the core mathematical analysis remains the same as it was in the original Uroboros paper and in fact this also shows how useful is this design strategy that we have. We had a mathematical analysis which explained how is it possible to formally prove secure proof-of-stake protocols and that was with the original Uroboros protocol and now we're capable of using the same machinery to fine-tune the protocol in various high-value specific scenarios that we could actually deploy it in the future. Yeah so I'm very excited about 2019 actually it's the reason is that all this year so far we put so much research effort to understand how proof-of-stake protocols can actually work and how you can develop them and deploy them securely and 2019 is going to be the year that we're going to see actually this being launched. So it can't be this is really the most exciting moment in a researcher's sort of work line because we've done the work we understand the protocols. Whiteboards over whiteboards have been full with proofs and analysis and now the development is almost at its final stages so what's going to happen in 2019? We're going to have the pleasure of actually seeing these protocols work in practice and being deployed and be used by people so it's a very exciting time. 2019 for all the research team to see all the fruits of labor of these last few years come actually to the end users as part of Cardano.