Originally founded to drive the creation of Filecoin, Cryptonet set out to create a community of researchers and engineers working on designing, proving, improving the building blocks for crypto-networks to engender new capabilities across the Web 3.

Can we speak privately? Unfortunately, our current options for private communication are limited, hamstrung by their reliance on a single-trusted-origin data publication model, high latencies, and security vulnerabilities. We think it is possible to design a scalable system that doesn’t sacrifice latency for privacy.

Blockchains based on a reusable resource (such as proof-of-stake or proof-of-space) are not as secure as those based on proof-of-work. Specifically, they are vulnerable to long-range attacks (LRA), where an adversary can create a long fork very cheaply.

In our ongoing quest to continuously improve the UX around our research grants programme, we’re announcing today a number of updates to both the framework and the operations that should enable a more streamlined, faster, and easier experience for all stakeholders.

Protocol Labs Research is committed to supporting the innovation needed to build our decentralized future. Today we are pleased to announce the expansion of the PL Research Grant Program to include a variety of new funding opportunities designed to support collaborative work on problems defined by the broader research community and critical to our work at Protocol Labs.

In the spring of 2020, as a rapid response to the COVID crisis, Protocol Labs launched an accelerated grants program to support open-source projects building tools to confront present and future pandemics.

In January of 2020, the Resilient Networks Lab (ResNetLab) launched two RFPs (Requests for Proposals) to address pressing open problems faced by IPFS and libp2p, namely, Routing at Scale and PubSub at Scale.

In the spring, as COVID-19 swept the globe, Protocol Labs quickly retooled its grant program and launched an accelerated grants program to support open-source projects building tools to confront present and future pandemics.

After a marathon review, followed by necessary legal and financial procedures, we are happy to announce the projects we are supporting with Protocol Labs’ COVID-19 Open Innovation Grant program. This program was created to surface and support open-source projects working on tools to help humanity through present and future pandemics.

In 2018, Protocol Labs launched a Request for Proposals program to support research in distributed systems, cryptography, and other areas of interest to our projects and company. To date, we have given over $500,000, with results made available to the public under open-source licenses.