From Consensus Research to Redbelly Network Pty Ltd (Invited Talk)

Designing and implementing correctly a blockchain system requires collaborations across places and research fields. Redbelly, a company across Australia, India and USA, illustrates well this idea. It started in 2005 at OPODIS, where we published the Reconfigurable Distributed Storage to replace distributed participants offering a service without disrupting its availability. This line of work [V. Gramoli et al., 2021] was instrumental to reconfigure blockchains without introducing hard forks. The research on the consensus problem we initiated at IRISA [V. Gramoli, 2022] led to rethinking PBFT-like algorithms for the context of blockchain by getting rid of the leader that can act as the bottleneck of large networks [V. Gramoli and Q. Tang, 2023]. Our work on security led to disclosing vulnerabilities in Ethereum [Parinya Ekparinya et al., 2020] and then motivated us to formally verify blockchain consensus [Nathalie Bertrand et al., 2022]. Our work at the frontier of economics [Michael Spain et al., 2019] led us to prevent front-running attacks [Pouriya Zarbafian and Vincent Gramoli, 2023] and to incentivize rational players to behave [Alejandro Ranchal-Pedrosa and Vincent Gramoli, 2022]. Our system work at Cornell and then at EPFL was foundational in experimenting blockchains across the globe [Vincent Gramoli et al., 2023]. Although not anticipated at the time, this series of work progressively led the University of Sydney and CSIRO, and later Redbelly Network Pty Ltd, to design the Redbelly Blockchain [Tyler Crain et al., 2021; Deepal Tennakoon et al., 2023], the platform of choice for compliant asset tokenisation.