Distributed ledger technology (DLT) and blockchains including Bitcoin and Ethereum may be more vulnerable to centralization risks than initially thought, according to Trail of Bits. The security firm on Tuesday released its report titled “Are Blockchains Decentralized?” which was commissioned by the United States government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The report aims to investigate whether blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum are truly decentralized, though the report appeared to focus largely on Bitcoin. Among its key findings, the security firm found that outdated Bitcoin nodes, unencrypted blockchain mining pools and a majority of unencrypted Bitcoin network traffic traversing over …
Simba Chain, a blockchain startup backed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), has won another contract from the United States government. A long-established favorite of the U.S. military authorities like the U.S. Air Force and the Navy, Simba Chain will soon build a blockchain project for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). The DoD has awarded Simba Chain a $200,000 contract to develop a proof-of-concept for a blockchain-based system for secure management of the authority’s research and development documentation. The award is a Phase I contract within the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, which encourages small businesses …
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will host a two-day blockchain workshop in February, according to an official request for information (RFI) posted Nov. 19. DARPA, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense, is looking to to investigate technologies for distributed consensus during a workshop “tentatively scheduled for February 14 and 15, 2019, in Arlington, VA.” As stated in the five-page RFI released by the agency’s Information Innovation Office (I2O), “of particular interest to DARPA are so-called ‘permissionless’ distributed consensus protocols.” Permissionless systems are described in the paper as protocols “where any individual may join in …