Tag: Open Source

Jack Dorsey’s Block Appoints MIT’s Neha Narula to Board of Directors

by Blockchain News

Block, Inc. (NYSE: SQ), a global technology company with a focus on financial services, announced on July 27, 2023, the appointment of Neha Narula, Director of the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, to its Board of Directors. This move further solidifies Block’s commitment to leveraging open source software and open protocols to transform the way people move money.

Narula, who has been serving as the Director of the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab since January 2017, brings a wealth of expertise in Bitcoin and open source technology to the board.

Prior to joining MIT, she held a position as a senior software engineer at Google. Narula also currently serves on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Innovation Advisory Council. Her academic credentials include a B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Dartmouth College and a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT.

“I’ve long admired Block’s focus on building simple, cohesive products that empower people and communities to participate in the financial system,” said Narula. “We share core values around the power of open source software and the ability for open protocols to transform the way people move money. I’m honored and excited to join Block’s board of directors and contribute to the company’s purpose of economic empowerment.”

Block’s Head and Chairman, Jack Dorsey, expressed his enthusiasm about Narula’s appointment, stating, “Neha’s expertise in Bitcoin and open source technology is a great addition to our Board. Neha’s passion for building intuitive, scaled systems to move money across the Internet efficiently fits into our company’s purpose, and we’re excited to have her join our team.”

Block, Inc., formerly known as Square, Inc., is composed of Square, Cash App, Spiral, TIDAL, and TBD. The company is dedicated to creating tools that expand access to the economy. Its integrated ecosystem of commerce solutions, business software, and banking services helps sellers run and grow their businesses.

With Cash App, anyone can easily send, spend, or invest their money in stocks or Bitcoin. Spiral builds and funds free, open-source Bitcoin projects, while TIDAL provides a platform for musicians and their fans to connect more deeply. TBD is building an open developer platform to make it easier to access Bitcoin and other blockchain technologies without having to go through an institution.

Narula’s appointment to the board is expected to further enhance Block’s mission of economic empowerment through the use of open source software and open protocols.

Image source: Shutterstock

Source

Tagged : / / / / / / / / / /

Block’s 5nm Bitcoin Mining Chip Prototype

by Blockchain News

The financial services and technology business Block, which is controlled by Jack Dorsey, has just finished the prototype design of its new 5nm Bitcoin mining chip. This was done with the intention of decentralizing the supply of Bitcoin mining rigs. The business noted that the development of Bitcoin mining ASIC rigs is both financially and technically hard, which has led to an excessive concentration of the ownership of specialized mining silicon in the hands of a few number of enterprises. It is believed that miners and the Bitcoin network as a whole would suffer from the negative effects of this concentration.

In response, Block intends to make Bitcoin mining technology open source wherever it is feasible by selling standalone ASICs and other hardware components. This move is intended to enhance the size of the Bitcoin mining hardware ecosystem while also maximizing the amount of innovation that may occur inside it. Because of the actions taken by the firm over the previous few months, it will now be able to experiment with new designs, which will help the company bring Bitcoin mining chips to market that are both more efficient and less expensive.

As a means of accelerating this development drive, Block has made a significant purchase of ASIC chips from Intel, prompting the latter to stop accepting new orders for its Blockscale 1000 Series ASICs. This move was made in order to shorten the development cycle. Block expects that by purchasing these ASICs from Intel, it would be able to speed up the development of its own 3nm chip, which, upon its eventual release, the company says will be the most technologically sophisticated semiconductor to date.

The significance of ASIC development to the Bitcoin mining process is reflected in Block’s concentration on the development of these devices. ASICs are computerized devices that are tailored to accomplish a particular computational function. They are commonly used for mining proof-of-work cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which need a specific computational task to be completed. When individual components of a chip get smaller, it becomes possible to pack more transistors into a silicon die of the same size. This results in increased overall efficiency and a reduction in the amount of heat that is generated.

Although 5nm ASIC chips have been available for some time, the first 5nm ASIC was not released until 2021 by the Chinese mining company Canaan. Despite this, no company has yet made the ASIC chip designs that they produce open source. It is anticipated that Block’s dedication to open source technology will have a substantial influence on the Bitcoin mining business. This will result in additional alternatives being available to miners and will contribute to the network’s efforts to become more decentralized.

Source

Tagged : / / / / /

StarkWare to Open Source Proprietary Prover

by Blockchain News

The scaling solution for Ethereum’s layer 2 To far, StarkWare has processed 327 million transactions and coined 95 million nonfungible tokens (NFTs). StarkWare has announced intentions to open source their proprietary Starknet Prover under the Apache 2.0 licence. This will take place in the near future.

The prover is an essential piece of software that Starkware employs in order to wrap up hundreds of thousands of transactions and condense them into a brief cryptographic proof that is then recorded on the Ethereum blockchain.

“Here at Stark Industries, we consider the Prover to be the technological equivalent of a magic wand. “It does a fantastic job of generating the proofs that enable inconceivable scalability,” said Eli Ben-Sasson, president and co-founder of Starkware. “It allows unprecedented growth.”

Starkware has come under fire from the cryptocurrency community as well as solutions that compete with it, such as ZK Sync and Polygon, for the fact that it retains ownership of the intellectual property (IP) that underpins its technology. This runs counter to the open source and interoperable ethics that underpin blockchain technology.

By making the prover open source and releasing it under the Apache 2.0 licence, any other project or network, as well as producers of games or databases, will be allowed to utilise the technology, modify the code, and personalise it as they see fit. The technology didn’t become widely available until 2020, but ImmutableX, Sorare, and dYdX are already making use of it.

Avihu Levy, head of product at Starkware, was hesitant to commit to a time period for open-sourcing the prover but said that it will take place after the introduction of the token and the decentralisation of Starknet itself. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that it would be doable throughout this year.

Levy said that the choice to open source the prover demonstrated that Starkware was becoming more confidence in its technology. He also stated that it would allow projects to become more confident about using it as an essential component of their protocols.

“Within StarkEx, this is something that is sometimes referred to as vendor lock-up or lock-in. Therefore, the commitment to StarkEx was not merely a commercial commitment; rather, it was a commitment to the company’s technological development,” he stated.

“This is a clear indication that you will have everything at your disposal to operate it without relying on Starkware,” the speaker said.

Starkware’s programming language and EVM rival, Cairo 1.0, as well as Papyrus Full node, have both been open-sourced, and the company is now in the process of open-sourcing their newest sequencer.

The Starkware Sessions conference was kicked off on Sunday in Tel Aviv by Ben-Sasson. According to the event’s organisers, it is the biggest layer 2 conference that has been hosted up to this point.

Around 500 visitors and engineers were in attendance when he made the statement. “This is a watershed moment for scaling Ethereum,” he said. It will establish Stark technology as a public asset that can be put to use for the common welfare of all people, which is the proper position for it.

Source

Tagged : / / / / / / /

Hedera Governing Council to buy hashgraph IP, and open-source projects code

by Cointelegraph

The Hedera Governing Council has officially voted to purchase the intellectual property rights to the hashgraph consensus algorithm from founding architect and inaugural member of the council, Swirlds Inc, for an undisclosed fee.

A Jan. 19 announcement also details plans to transition their code to an open-source model this year under Apache 2.0 license, in addition to transferring core team members such as CEO Mance Harmon and chief scientist Dr. Leemon Baird from Hedera to Swirlds Inc. as the CEO and CTO respectively, and deploying community staking and node opportunities, among other updates.

Hedera Hashgraph is an enterprise-grade distributed ledger technology designed to create decentralized applications in the Web3 sphere.

It’s governing council is composed of 39 corporations including Google, IBM, Tata Communications and Boeing, who each support the project’s decentralized ambitions through the establishment and operation of blockchain nodes, and participating in governance voting, among other duties.

Hedera’s evolution to an open-source technology differs from their current model of open-review, in which the code appears as publicly visible, but is not accessible for editing or developmental purposes by the global community.

The decision to enact this change came about following conclusive technical assessments that the probability of a network split within the Hedera ecosystem is highly unlikely, and therefore the patent upholding legislative exclusivity to the technology can be safely distributed into the public domain, with assurances that it will not serve as an advantageous tool for market competitors, but rather a mechanism to foster internal growth.

Baird, the newly appointed CTO of Swirlds, and co-chair of the Hedera Council’s Technical Steering and Product Committee, said:

“From day one, I have had a vision to enable ‘Shared Worlds’, where anyone can gather, collaborate, conduct commerce, and control their own online footprint.

Baird also noted that the next challenge for Hedera is to expand from a Layer 1 protocol “to deliver products and services that enable others to leverage the power of the Layer 1 protocol to create value.”

Harmon and Baird, among others are scheduled to host a YouTube webinar at 11 a.m. ET today to discuss the Shared Worlds initiative in further detail, alongside developments over the coming months.

From a technical perspective, Hedera’s native token, HBAR has largely consolidated in the $0.33 to $0.25 price range since the turn of the year, currently valued at $0.257.

Related: UK air traffic tech firm uses Hedera Hashgraph to track drones

Earlier this month, Hedera partnered with London-based tech firm, Neuron Innovations on a drone initiative designed to collate and store quantitative data metrics on an array of sectors including commercial and military aviation, as well as government initiatives.

Supported by the United Kingdom’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the pilot scheme — conducted in April and October 2021 — is expected to support the adoption of drones into the existing air traffic transportation system.