 Mentoring students is one of the most fascinating aspects of being a professor at the university. It's basically if you want the energy I have in the morning, it frequently comes from the interaction with younger students that are interested and excited about the stuff we do at the lab. In general I'm working in game theoretic aspects of cryptocurrencies and this means that I'm studying if players have incentives to follow the protocol and which means that following the protocol is the best strategy for them because they will earn more rewards and in these months the specific project I'm working is that given a specific reward mechanism I'm studying how players have incentives to play and in which state they will end up and if the state is stable and which properties this state has and this is useful because we want to find a reward mechanism that will incentivize players to follow the protocol because they will earn the most rewards in this way and in addition this reward mechanism will incentivize them to end up in a state that is stable and it has some nice properties. For example one nice property is that players are organized into a given number of pools for example are organized in k pools that it is not too many not too few for example one or two pools to just mine and this is the general idea from what I'm doing now and the way we are doing is that we combine game theoretic aspects and cryptographic aspects in order to find a definition to support the theory from this problem and to prove theorems regarding the state in which players will end up with this reward mechanism. Right, so for the past months we have been working with Margarita Larrageira from Tokyo and Professor Kajas on designing the account management scheme and the different actions that a user can take using their wallet such as issuing transactions, issuing delegations or even creating blocks. So we have designed the scheme that will be implemented in the next Cardano release surely and we have designed the implementation and also we provide a theoretical model that this implementation actually covers so we have structured a theoretical model we provide some proofs that we can go from that model using some steps all the way down to the implementation that we will actually define. So now we are working on attestation techniques for injection detection attacks for injection of code and data and our job is to detect and alert the user that system has been attacked and we are thinking of extending this to use secure hardware on how to protect against different blockchain attacks or to make the blockchain more usable. At the moment I'm involved in two projects one is called Oxchain which is providing some blockchain based services for a famous charity called Oxfam. My role in this project is to design and implement some smart contracts. Also I'm involved in the second project which tries to answer the following question Can we use blockchain and its capability to check availability of some service? This service can be provided by some off-chain companies such as cloud computing and the service can be like data storing the data and checking the integrity of data. My research is fairly open-ended so there aren't any concrete results I can show at this time but what I've been working on is formalizing what smart contracts are and there has been quite a bit of progress online so right now I'm working on trying to decompose Ethereum into many small components which put together make up the entire system and then working from there we'll see which of those components are actually necessary for smart contracts so one of the preliminary results for example is that you don't necessarily need a token to back a smart contract so well obviously it makes sense that you have some sort of incentive from miners and so on it's not necessarily integral to the concept of smart contracts you could imagine for instance private blockchains which don't have tokens at all but only deal with contracts and contract states in some way. Since recently the lab is growing and we are having more scientists and PhD students it provides more opportunity to create more projects and collaborate with more people from different backgrounds and knowledge and which is very interesting because we can tackle the same problem from different angles and also we can expand one specific idea and project which is great. All the researchers and the students here at the lab are working in order to enhance and add new features in the protocols that we already have under the assumption that these features are tested and are proven secure in the theoretical models and frameworks that we use from the literature and every week we also have iterations so that each researcher and each student knows what the other teams are doing and also provides some feedback that they might want. We have a very good relationship with our professors, with the members of the lab and it's very fun to work here and very satisfying.