The Beldex Research Labs, founded in January 2022, has made significant strides in the research and development of the Beldex Ecosystem. It has conducted extensive research into the scaling of the Beldex blockchain and improvisation of the existing consensus protocol. The Beldex research team has also developed a proof of concept for the integration of the Ethereum Virtual Machine onto the Beldex chain, a notable feat that could also lay the groundwork for the integration of EVM onto similar cryptonote-based privacy chains.
Acknowledgement
We thank Dr. Mitchell Krawiec-Thayer and his fellow researchers from Geometry labs and Dr. Dominique Schröder from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg for their commendable contributions for the continued success of our research.
Why Beldex Research Labs
The Beldex Research Labs, the research wing of the project, was founded to enhance the capabilities of the Beldex chain as the ecosystem grows — more dApps, more users, and more transactions. The Beldex chain should be robust and fast to support the growing numbers. It should also be able to support smart contract transactions.
In order to realize this, Beldex put together a team of researchers to drive through innovation. We began investing our time, energy and resources into the research labs. For this purpose, a portion of the ecosystem development funds were allocated to the research labs.
We expanded our team of researchers. In September 2022, Beldex partnered with leading researchers from Geometry Labs led by Dr. Mitchell. At the same time, we also onboarded Dr. Dominic from the Erlangen-Nuremberg University in Germany. Both Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Dominic had previously contributed to Monero Research Labs and they were excited to be a part of the Beldex research team.
The team also on-boarded independent researchers and began to extensively work on three key areas — EVM integration, scaling and fine-tuning the existing consensus protocol while maintaining the core principles of decentralization, privacy and security for all.
The Beldex Research Labs has since then made tremendous progress. In July 2023, they completed their research on a proof of concept for EVM on Cryptonote based blockchains.
Why EVM POC?
Smart contracts are a quintessential part of every blockchain ecosystem. However, in their current state, they lack privacy and are prone to vulnerabilities. The Beldex Research Labs set out to add smart contract functionality to the Beldex chain without having to sacrifice privacy. The team has developed a proof of concept to integrate EVM onto the Beldex chain. The first phase implementing EVM integration will begin in December 2023.
Read the paper on Proof of Concept for an Ethereum Virtual Machine on Cryptonote.
Ongoing research: The ongoing research includes utilizing a Verifiable Random Function (VRF) to enhance the existing POS consensus protocol. 1 block leader and 10 block validators are selected from a pool of masternodes. The VRF would allow the further randomization of the selection process. This is significant because it helps to augment the security of the network while reducing the time taken for consensus.
Another part of the research is on enhancing the scalability of the network by reducing proof sizes using accumulators that help verify transactions faster. More on this will be discussed as we progress.
Stay tuned for further updates.
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