A $3.3 Billion Claim: Has Cardano's Blockchain 'Solved' Proof-of-Stake?

The CEO of blockchain firm IOHK, Hoskinson was seeking to send a message about a new research paper, one he believes proved that the company's novel twist on how blockchains come to consensus, called Ouroboros, had addressed long-standing concerns about whether the model can sufficiently secure investor funds.

Soon to power the public blockchain cardano, Ouroboros may one day support the world's eighth-largest cryptocurrency, with its 25 billion ADA tokens worth $3.3 billion.

Still, the team behind cardano, IOHK, have worked to secure academic partnerships, as well as relationships with researchers in the field distributed computation in an effort to prove the proof-of-stake model can be achieved.

It's not just proof-of-stake researchers that disagree - in the broader landscape of consensus design, there's some who believe proof-of-stake is doomed from the start.

Dahlia Malkhi, a distributed system researcher, claimed earlier this year that ethereum's proof of stake model, Casper, is "Fundamentally vulnerable"- leading to a system where consensus is powered by the wealthy.

"We basically have a kind of a university-company relationship, so what we generally do is we set up research centers, we embed some IOHK personnel within those research centers, and we subsidize the lab, and then we have some sort of control or influence over the research agenda," Hoskinson said.

Still, at the time of writing, it's unclear how the protocol will behave in the wild, and there's ways in which the wider proof-of-stake research community hasn't been entirely receptive of cardano's claims.

While the protocol itself is in place, IOHK are still working on building the underlying incentive scheme, something that Casper researcher Vlad Zamfir believes should be designed in tandem with the tech.

"Ouroboros has the advantage that it is peer reviewed and a well-credentialed research group stands behind the effort," Gün Sirer told CoinDesk, "But it also suffers from a downside that plague many early proof-of-stake protocols, namely: the papers are long, dense and full of subtle proofs."

Hoskinson said he anticipates more research on Ouroboros and cardano to emerge going forward.