A talk by Robbert van Renesse on "Vegvisir: A Partition-Tolerant Blockchain for the Internet-of-Things"

ABSTRACT:

While the intersection of blockchains and the Internet of Things (IoT) have 
received considerable research interest lately, Nakamoto-style blockchains 
possess a number of qualities that make them poorly suited for many IoT scenarios. 
Specifically, they require high network connectivity and are power-intensive. 
This is a drawback in IoT environments where battery-constrained nodes form 
an unreliable ad hoc network such as in digital agriculture. 

In this talk we present Vegvisir, a partition-tolerant blockchain for use in 
power-constrained IoT environments with limited network connectivity. It is 
a permissioned, directed acyclic graph (DAG)-structured blockchain that can 
be used to create a shared, tamperproof data repository that keeps track of 
data provenance. We discuss the use cases, architecture, and challenges 
of such a blockchain.


SPEAKER'S BIO:

Robbert van Renesse is a Research Professor in the Department of Computer 
Science at Cornell University, interested in the theory and practice of fault tolerant, 
secure, and scalable distributed systems.  He has developed widely used distributed 
algorithms such as Chain Replication and Scuttlebutt (State Reconciliation for 
Gossip Protocols).  He is a Fellow of the ACM, and currently serves as Chair of 
the ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS).

Robbert van Renesse was involved in the FAST startup in Norway and 
served for a period as an adjunct professor at the University of Tromsø. His Google 
h-index is 61 and he has more than 16,000 citations to his work. A leader in 
developing scalable solutions, Van Renesse’s work was directly employed 
in key aspects of both Microsoft’s and Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructures. 
Further, he has taught in short courses worldwide and is greatly in demand 
as a keynote speaker at major conferences.