DAGlabs just released Kaspa tesnet:
Kaspa is a Golang implementation of Phantom / GhostDAG protocol that was developed by Aviv Zohar and Yonatan Sompolinsky from HUJI.
It’s a generalization of Nakamoto Consensus and uses POW similar to Bitcoin.
It has high throughput (100s TP/S on layer1 currently but can go higher), 1-sec confirmation, and fast probabilistic finality of a few seconds. It also has a very big advantage for mining decentralization. The high block rate significantly mitigates the need to join mining pools, as frequent rewards are given even to solo miners (above some threshold), facilitating a much larger distribution of solo miners.
Zohar and Sompolinsky's past research included Ghost (not GhostDAG) which Ethereum whitepaper referenced to and later Ethereum devs tried to implement and kind of botched it.
Yonatan Sompolinsky was the program committee chair of Scaling Bitcoin 2019 in Tel Aviv.
Elichai Turkel, a known Israeli Bitcoin core contributor works part-time in DAGlabs’s research team.
References and links:
You can play with the Testnet here: https://www.daglabs.com/community
You can watch the blocks DAG here: http://kgi-testnet-4.daglabs-dev.com/ (live view)
Kaspa’s discord: https://discord.gg/YNYnNN5Pf2
DAGlabs homepage: https://www.daglabs.com/
DAGlabs Twitter: https://twitter.com/DAGlabsOfficial
DAGlabs Medium: DAGlabs
Kaspa GitHub: https://github.com/kaspanet
Phantom / GhostDAG paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/104
Kaspa research page: https://research.kas.pa/
Aviv Zohar’s homepage: https://www.avivz.net/
Aviv Zohar’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/Avivz78
Yonatan Sompolinsky’s scholar page: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=hTWnlpYAAAAJ&h
Yonatan Sompolinsky’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/hashdag
Elichai Turkel’s GitHub: https://github.com/elichai
Elichai Turkel’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/elichai2
Scaling Bitcoin 2019 page: https://telaviv2019.scalingbitcoin.org/
Ghost paper: https://www.avivz.net/pubs/15/btc_ghost_full.pdf
ETH whitepaper with the reference to Ghost: https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/
Spectre paper: https://btcmanager.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/SPECTRE_complete.pdf
Spectre medium: https://medium.com/blockchains-huji/the-spectre-protocol-7dbbebb707b5
Phantom paper: https://allquantor.at/blockchainbib/pdf/sompolinsky2018phantom.pdf
Scalability II — Ghost Spectre Aviv Zohar Technion Cyber and Computer Security Summer School: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mEaBXl3BMM
Aviv Zohar & Yonatan Sompolinsky: Of Spectre & Ghosts — Radical Ideas to Scale Blockchain Tech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzXH4I8ncVs
Aviv Zohar — DAG Protocols to Address On-chain Scalability: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8-DPmWXYns
Dr. Aviv Zohar: Accelerating Bitcoin: Fast money grows on trees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSq-emtyx5g
The PHANTOM and GHOST-DAG protocols presented at “Scaling Bitcoin 2018 — Kaizen”: https://youtu.be/3Hksieg5GdM?t=1811
Aviv Zohar’s talk at the “Data, Dollars, and Algorithms: The Computational Economy” Symposium at Harvard: https://youtu.be/gRm2RllZzUo
Rethink Trust 2018: Yonatan Sompolinsky, Bridging the gap: untrusting devs and trust seeking users: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENDLVofY4oE Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2vSNVz_GEQ
From Blockchains to BlockDAGs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk38AAV_whw
2nd HebrewU Networking Summer — Yonatan Sompolinsky, Hebrew University & DAGlabs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3JJ5geh38o
SPECTRE — BPASE ’18: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57DCYtk0lWI
Tarilabs article on DAGs: https://tlu.tarilabs.com/scaling/directed-acyclic-graphs/DAGs.html
How Increasing the Throughput Harms Bitcoin’s Security by Ori Newman from DAGlabs
Scaling Bitcoin with BlockDAG by Ori Newman from DAGlabs
