Round 1 / Public Good Crypto (was CryptoNet)

Executive summary:

• Cryptonet has been a very prolific research and protocol design team in the Filecoin ecosystem - its ideas led to several impactful protocol upgrades (SnarkPack, Snapdeal, NI-PoRep, etc)
• This team plans to continue building a large community of researchers and do great research for the success of the Filecoin network (previously worked on SnarkPack, Testudo, Vector Commitments, Proof of Replication, etc)

The protocol part of CryptoNet is going to FilOz, the research part is turning int Public Good Crypto which runs research initiatives and distributes funding.

There are two main types of impact for Public Good Crypto

Solving hard problems A research entity can solve problems that can’t be solved by simply by more engineering.

We have seen this several time in Filecoin, to name a few: the design of the first practical PoRep came from a research grant to Ben Fisch (this led to making Filecoin practical), the design of SnarkPack came from Anca (this allowed for exabyte scaling network), the security analysis of PoRep which led to tighter bounds came from Leo (this increased our confidence in the lifetime of our sectors to several more years). This can be done both via grants and by hiring some of the best researchers full time.

Aligning researchers The best way to scale a research team is to align the research community on our problems.

It can be hard for researchers to understand how a generic solution can have an impact on a specific problem in Filecoin; translating Filecoin specific needs in problem definitions that can be attractive to the research community can help us engage with a larger audience.

We have seen this several times in Filecoin: the need for faster SNARKs and our original RFC led to the design of Plonk (one of the most used SNARK alongside Groth16, STARKs and Halo), several teams writing improvements on PoRep (Leo’s latest paper, Ari Juel’s proof of incompressable proof) and our vector commitments are leading to major improvements in SNARKs (Lasso, CQ).

More importantly, we have seen that funding focused research teams (even with small grants) has led to very meaningful collaborations (e.g. work on tighter bounds of the existing PoRep).