 All right, everyone, thank you for joining us. This is consensus factory, decentralized reflections on consensus. It is an event that we're organizing for the first time this year. And the goal is mainly to present different perspectives on blockchain scalability from projects across, and sorry, I was listening to myself on YouTube, from projects across the industry. So we have a full program today with speakers from several of those projects. I will not go into it in detail, because our first speaker will. And our first speaker is Markovo College, is the consensus web leads at Protocol Labs, since he joined in, well, last year in 2021. Part of that, he was a principal research staff member at IBM Research Zürich, and earlier he was also a postdoc there. He obtained his PhD from EPFL in the Distributed Programming Laboratory. And prior to that, he was also at EPFL for his previous degrees and the University of Belgrade. His main research interests are in decentralized systems, and particularly systems that span multiple, sorry, administrative interest domains, namely permissionless and permission blockchain systems. And so Marko will be introducing the events and giving us an overview of the work that is also doing. You can take it from here, Marko. Thanks, George, a lot. So welcome, everyone. Welcome to consensus factories. So this is our attempt to bring together in a decentralized fashion, like bottom up leading web three projects. So each of the speakers that you're going to hear today is talking about their chosen work. So basically we have set of five invited talks. And then the idea, I mean, you can listen to these talks on YouTube and following individual projects. But what is the goal of the event is really to try to come together in the end. So we're going to have basically our final session, in which I will give you an agenda shortly, in which we are going to try to make sense out of this. These are L1 projects. So they all made kind of aim to be the backbone of their own ecosystems. But can we build something more together? Can we interoperate together? Can we make, I would say, not a project ecosystem out of each project individually, but like web three ecosystem. So that's the main point of the event. And now working into detail, so why is consensus scaling in the first place important, which is the topic of this event, right? So consensus is the bottleneck of decentralized systems. And it's also its backbone and basically the heart, whatever you want to call it. And there are main two bottlenecks in current L1 or actually like legacy L1 systems or established L1 systems for me. And these are related to ordering because consensus what it does is essentially provides your global order of transactions in a nutshell. And there is transaction execution or validation, whatever you want to call this, right? So as you are basically ordering these transactions across a set of nodes, these nodes essentially need to execute them one by one or sequential. And ordering is a bottleneck because like where we started from, for example, with Bitcoin, we have seven transactions per second on very, very robust and decentralized L1. Then on Ethereum, we have around 15 or so transactions per second. And this is clearly not going to scale for even for just payment purposes if you think of payment or like with Bitcoin trust, like money and payments what Bitcoin is trying to establish, let alone if you start executing smart contracts like Ethereum does, right? And basically any protocol, so in the ordering world, let's moving to very efficient protocols, losing some decentralization perhaps and some security, right? Because they are trade-offs. Even if you throw in the best protocol on a single, let's say consensus instance, this will be a bottleneck because it will be limited by single validator specification because each and every node needs to kind of process all transactions. And then we come to execution and execution in current smart contracts is largely sequential and many projects try to overcome this and we will hear some of the attempts soon. But so if we throw for example the best consensus protocol the bottleneck will be typically transaction execution latency. So this is in a nutshell where we stand and there are different attempts to overcome this situation. And but they mostly focus on their own like each project focuses on their own goals like zooming out a bit like if you want to implement a decentralized web like web three we would need to scale at like what we have to provide us today. So we need to think about maybe billions or trillions transactions and we need to have different latency constraints depending on a use case or like on the guarantees that we want to have and the situation complicates dramatically. So I won't read out all these high level consensus requirements but it's kind of clear that we want to improve the performance and scalability of a single consensus instance but we also want to scale out, right? So we want to be able to make that not each validator executes every transaction but then we have some kind of load balancing and these sorts of things and the situation gets coming, right? So one year ago protocol labs basically form consensus lab and consensus lab is dedicated in the protocol labs basically to the scalable consensus and decentralized systems research. So we have our own in-house R&D team which consists of 15 members but we are very, very, very dedicated. So one of our hallmarks I would say is that we are dedicated to collaboration with academia and other web three projects. We also run different grants and decentralized funding schemes like many other projects but we are building like we have events such as consensus factory today and where we try to bring the knowledge from different ecosystems and different viewpoints and which don't necessarily agree with each other together to try to build together a decentralized web, decentralized computing and better in the like zooming out even more better place for people to live on this planet. So consensus factory is our event that we enrich and foster collaboration with other web three projects and consensus days is another event that I will talk about more which is more academically oriented and we have a dedicated to working in the open. So if you go to our consensus lab.world you will find our landing page and from there all the links related to our work like GitHub or like our weekly progress notice or like our grants or whatever you need and also a link to our Slack channel. So I'm highlighting the Slack channel because we are going to use it today for communication and discussion, right? So it can ask questions in the consensus channel but you can also use it for discussions and in our previous events this work magically. So this was like leading to really lively discussions and so on. So basically out of all this collaboration and in-house work we are trying to impact not only the Falcon and IPFS ecosystem but the entire web three ecosystem. Essentially we are structuring our work in consensus lab in three different pillars or three different areas if you want and I'm pretty sure we will hear today about each and every one of these in some sense. So one is related to this not having a single consensus instance but like multiple consensus instances somehow collaborating together. Let's call this very, very abstractly sharding and then inside of which each shard in such a system there are scalable consensus implementations, right? So depending the requirements depend whether you're talking about L1s with thousands or like even more nodes, right? Maybe tens of thousands of nodes or if you go down maybe you have less like smaller number of nodes which you can use more efficient protocols and so on. So this second area would be scalable consensus implementations and the third area of importance and the third area of focus for consensus lab is scalable execution. How do we support different execution environments? How do we go about parallel maybe speculative execution? How do we do computation over arbitrary data and not just on chain data and so on? So about our events we started with consensus days last year. So this was the first event that consensus lab organized. So we had more than 250 registered participants. This was mostly our consensus days our academic event, right? So this was an event where we accepted the talks which are also like new talks but also like existing work but recent and it was a huge success. And one of the hallmarks of that event was this panel on decentralized collaboration and today we have a similar session which is the last session where we try to learning the lessons that we heard during the day try to discuss how we can put these Lego pieces together and maybe build something better as a whole. Consensus days appearing this year as well. This year is an ACM CCS workshop. So I'm just advertising it a bit here because the deadline is Friday this week. So again, we are accepting both new and recent published work even. So you can just consider submitting your best work to consensus day. And we are organizing this, consensus lab is organizing this together with Berkeley central for responsible decentralized intelligence led by Donaldson. Finally, consensus factory, right? So we have an amazing set of speakers and these are the people who might think, thank very much who responded to our invitation to give us a talk about their work today. And we'll have a search of men up from informal system dunk advice from Ethereum Foundation. Arnobie from IHK, I think Sebastian is not going to make it. Alfonso Delaroja from Consensus Lab Protocol Labs and Victor Luchango from Algorand. Again, you can hear probably all of this talks on YouTube but the idea is that we try to bring this together in the last session which is this call decentralized reflection on consensus like a Q&A panel. And just a bit of preliminaries, so technical stuff. So for the event, join our Slack channels for online discussions, asking questions during the event. You can do it in a Zoom chat as well. But if you want like more structured discussions specific to your Slack. So then we will stick to schedule. As you will see in the previous slide I mentioned that we have like each talk starts a specific time and because some people might join only for certain talks then we are going to start every talk right at time. So in case that talk ends before schedule time we are going to start the Q&A session pertaining to the talk earlier but we are not going to start the next talk before schedule time. And then we have two 10 minute breaks scheduled for 240 UTC and 10 pass for UTC 10 minute breaks. So with that, I welcome you to the event and George let's announce our first speaker. Thank you and enjoy the event.