Agoric Speaker Series

Higher Order Smart Contracts

May 7, 2019 San Francisco, California

For smart contracts to reach their potential, they will need to safely compose and run across chains. Mark Miller will show how ocaps and erights enable complex smart contracts across chains.

Professor Potts and Dr Berg from the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub present Institutional Cryptoeconomics – a new field of research that allows us to understand which sectors of industries, and organisations will be disrupted by blockchain technology, and the new governance models that will support that disruption.

Distributed Programming for a Decentralized World

July 15, 2019 San Francisco, California

1/4 Mark Miller introduces the Agoric stack for creating safe, composable and interoperable smart contracts.

2/4 Mark Miller shows how JavaScript can be used as a secure, object-capability language. With SES, our secure JavaScript runtime, developers can write robust and reliable smart contracts.

3/4 Mark shows how our vat model, through the IBC and CapTP protocols, can turn SES into a distributed, cross-chain, secure programming language.

4/4 Mark introduces the Agoric contract layer as a distinct layer of abstraction that makes defining and exchanging digital assets (erights) as simple as standard programming.

Can Blockchains Provide Rule of Law?

September 5, 2019 San Francisco, California

Features such as property rights and contract enforcement are typically bundled together under the term “Rule of Law.” If Bitcoin could enforce property rights for bitcoin, and general smart contract frameworks can enforce some types of arrangements, can blockchains provide rule of law? How do we define the rule of law? Are there aspects of the rule of law that blockchains excel at providing? Are there aspects that they fail to provide?

Smart Contracts - Where They've Been & Where They're Going

September 5, 2019 San Francisco, California

The idea of smart contracts has roots that go back to work in the 1980s and crystalizing as a concept with Nick Szabo in the 1990s. This talk traces the history of smart contracts and draws lessons from this to suggest where they are headed.

Zoe and ERTP: Offer Safety for Smart Contracts

October 29, 2019 San Francisco, California

Zoe is a framework for building smart contracts like auctions, swaps, decentralized exchanges, and more. Zoe itself is a smart contract written in JavaScript and running on the Agoric platform.