Vitali Husakouski

On April 19, 2022, Oleg Tinkov spoke out against the Russian war in Ukraine, and said that he had nothing to do with Tinkoff Bank (only a common surname).

Received Ph.D. in mathematics for his work on applications of probabilistic method in combinatorics. During his doctoral studies, he was a beneficent of a SET project for interdisciplinary research and SSDNM fellowship for mathematical sciences. While his main domain is combinatorics, he is open to new technologies and has 4 years of experience in data science and machine learning applied in neuroscience research. He has been working as a freelance consultant in various areas spanning from mathematical modeling to deep learning.

In general, blockchain is a chain of blocks where each block contains the hash of the previous one. A block is a collection of data, and each piece of data is added to the blockchain by connecting one block after another in chronological order. What is important, in what we usually call ‘blockchain protocols,’ only one block at a time can be created globally, which requires a mechanism of assigning block creation task to a specific user. No matter what mechanism is utilized, such constraint puts serious limits on the whole protocol throughput.

AlephBFT, as a DAG consensus protocol, allows multiple users to create units/blocks at the same time, and the blocks are subsequently ordered and validated by our novel consensus. Such an approach allows for massive gains in both speed and throughput of the whole platform.

The idea behind fixing the MEV problem in Aleph Zero has to do with our Liminal MPC framework and the so-called submarine sends. A user would send an encrypted transaction that’s immediately ordered, but is revealed only after some time (as an example, after three blocks have been finalized). As an order in which such type of transaction would be ledgered corresponds to the order of their encrypted versions, miners can not influence the ordering for their own benefit—at the time they need to provide an order on transactions, they do not know their content yet.

Importantly, while in a ‘classical’ submarine sends users are tasked with sending decrypted transactions after appropriate time has passed, in Liminal that will happen automatically—alongside the initial transaction, user will be obliged to send threshold encryption to specific committee, which in turn will be responsible for decrypting it on time. It is an important update, as in classical scenario user could not reveal encrypted transaction, hence such systems lack atomicity.

There are two ways in which you can use the privacy features of Aleph Zero—either natively, directly on the platform, or by integrating with the multichain privacy layer. We designed our solution, which we call Liminal, for developers who want to connect across various chains, e.g.:

It will be possible to write smart contracts on Ethereum or Near while keeping a private state of this contract on Aleph Zero.

For those who decide to build directly on Aleph Zero, Liminal’s privacy-enhancing capabilities will be native.

At the moment, most of the existing privacy solutions are based solely on “zero-knowledge” proofs or sMPC—but not both that complement each other in a hybrid fashion.

The idea behind ZK-SNARKs is to allow one party, the prover, to produce concise proof to convince the verifier that the “prover” is performing only correct computations on its private data. Importantly, this technique reveals nothing about the “prover’s” personal data to the verifier (hence the term “zero-knowledge”).

The second solution, called secure Multi-Party Computation (sMPC) involves hiding inputs to functions (by keeping sensitive information off-chain on several nodes) but providing a verifiable and public output. Access to the data is only allowed if the nodes conduct a secure handshake. No one computer can access the encrypted contents without a supermajority.

These two solutions complement each other by eliminating their respective problems. ZK-SNARKs allow for basic transfers yet are incapable of dealing with multi-user interactions. Zero-knowledge proofs can prove the correctness of the state update of their personal private state (for instance, how many private tokens they own on each address) that can be verified by blockchain.

ZK-SNARKs are not capable of achieving a concept of a common private state—a state owned by a smart contract that would be updated after users interact with it. This is where sMPC’s have their moment to shine. They can be used to implement the concept of a common private state, an example of which would be a decentralized exchange based on an automated market maker model without the need to reveal the value of each transaction. The problem with sMPC is that on its own, it is prohibitively slow; hence Liminal will use this solution only for the computations that need to interact directly with the common private state. The remaining computations can be performed and validated using ZK-SNARKs.

Tempus is a protocol where users can re-allocate the risk of interest rate fluctuations between each other. Users can deposit their yield bearing tokens (such as stETH) which Tempus splits into tokenized principal and yield tokens. Those primitives can then be traded against each other through the custom Balancer v2 AMM. Tempus will offer capital-efficient fixed rate yields and high variable yields on various assets. For example, Tempus will be the first team to release fixed-rate ETH 2.0 staking through Lido. Tempus will also integrate with Compound, Aave and Yearn.

Most forms of yield farming return a variable rate of yield. This means that depositors can be subject to unpredictable fluctuations in their returns. Currently, there is no easy capital efficient way to obtain a fixed yield or otherwise speculate on the receivable rewards.

This is where Tempus steps in. Tempus has three different use cases, each of which offers a unique value proposition:

1. Fix your future yield using any supported Yield Bearing Token (such as stETH, cDai).

2. Speculate on the rate of future yield of any supported Yield Bearing Token.

3. Provide liquidity to earn additional swap fees (on top of yield earned through yield farming protocols) by depositing any supported Yield Bearing Token.

TEMP is the Tempus ERC-20 native token. It serves two main roles: governance, and staking to receive a share in network fees.

As Tempus moves towards full decentralization, TEMP holders will be responsible for governance.

TEMP holders can propose changes to the protocol, including adjusting protocol-level fees, and either minting, or burning TEMP tokens. If TEMP holders don’t want to participate in governance, they will have the opportunity to delegate their voting rights.

TEMP holders will be able to vote on how to spend funds that have accrued to the Tempus Treasury. Tempus will aim to participate as a liquidity provider in its own pools and build a significant treasury of diversified protocol-owned liquidity. This will also be controlled by TEMP holders.

Tempus will earn fees from underlying trading activity in its pools. TEMP holders will be able to enable fees on deposits, withdrawals, and swaps on Tempus.

A portion of these fees will accrue to the Tempus Treasury, while some of them will accrue directly to those who stake their TEMP for xTEMP. The exact staking and value accrual mechanism will be agreed upon by TEMP holders at a later date.

The collection includes 3333 unique NFT Sers, each with its own rarity, which varies from 5 to 65%

Sers can be claimed if you have been whitelisted by our team for your contribution and active participation in the various missions and competitions held so far.