Research Pages

The Polkadot research pages are edited directly by the researchers at W3F and contain papers, articles and documents that are sources for the information on the wiki.

The following papers and articles may be of special interest for those interested in exploring Polkadot from a research or academic perspective.

Research Papers

• Efficient Aggregatable BLS Signatures with Chaum-Pedersen Proofs - describes our improvements regarding efficient verification for BLS signatures for both individual as well as aggregated signatures.
• Accountable Light Client Systems for PoS Blockchains - Implemented as an efficient method to aggregate BLS signatures and BLS public keys which in turn is used to build light client systems that are the core cryptographic primitive for secure proof-of-stake blockchain bridges. In turn, the efficient BLS aggregation can be securely proven to a light client verifier using a custom designed SNARK. Authors: Oana Ciobotaru, Fatemeh Shirazi, Alistair Stewart, Sergey Vasilyev
• Overview of Polkadot and its Design Considerations - A broad overview of the design of Polkadot. Authors: Jeff Burdges, Alfonso Cevallos, Peter Czaban, Rob Habermeier, Syed Hosseini, Fabio Lama, Handan Kılınç Alper, Ximin Luo, Fatemeh Shirazi, Alistair Stewart, Gavin Wood
• Intro to Nominated Proof of Stake - A description of the NPoS scheme which selects which validators are allowed to participate in the consensus protocol of Polkadot. Author: Alfonso Cevallos
• GRANDPA: A Byzantine Finality Gadget - GHOST-based Recursive Ancestor Deriving Prefix Agreement, Polkadot's finality gadget. Authors: Alistair Stewart and Lefteris Kokoris Kogias
• A Verifiably Secure and Proportional Committee Election Rule - Validator Election in Nominated Proof of Stake. Authors: Alfonso Cevallos and Alistair Stewart
• Network Time with a Consensus on Clock - Consensus on Clock in Universally Composable Timing. Author: Handan Kılınç Alper
• Delay Encryption - Delay Encryption can roughly be described as “identity based encryption with slow derived private key issuance”. Authors: Jeff Burdges and Luca de Feo

Research Blogs

• An Updated Overview of Polkadot – Gives a summary of the paper “Overview of Polkadot and its Design Considerations”
• Polkadot Research Update – Gives a summary of the papers on Validator Election in Nominated Proof of Stake, Network Time with a Consensus on Clock, and Byzantine Finality Gadgets.
• Polkadot’s Messaging Scheme – Gives an outline of Cross-Chain Message Passing (XCMP). Authors: Fatemeh Shirazi, Logan Saether, Alistair Stewart, Rob Habermeier, Gavin Wood
• How Nominated Proof of Stake Will Work in Polkadot – Gives an outline of Nominated Proof of Stake in Polkadot. Author: Alfonzo Cevallos
• Messaging Protocol Workshop Outcomes – An initiative to design and implement a privacy-preserving communication system for decentralized applications.