Darmstadt-Warsaw Research Seminar on Cryptography and Blockchains: One Person’s Craziness is Another Person’s Reality Or An Introduction to NFTs

Organizer:
Prof. Sebastian Faust (TU Darmstadt)
Prof. Stefan Dziembowski (University of Warsaw)

Abstract

A digital image of Edward Snowden sold for $5.4M. Well… what sold was not exactly the image, it was an NFT or non-fungible token that grants “ownership” of the image to its owner. This is just one example of what some would consider the opportunity (or maybe insanity) for new ways of collecting, exchanging and owning digital assets like images, videos, tweets, or 3D models. In this talk, we’ll go through a basic introduction of NFTs and what they might mean for the future of “data economies”. We’ll touch a bit on the social and financial aspects, and then focus on the technologies that are currently used to implement NFTs and some potential future directions that build on Intel trusted execution technologies.

Short bio

Mic Bowman is a senior principal engineer in Intel Labs and leads the decentralized computing research group. Mic’s research focuses on large-scale, multi-party distributed systems. Among other roles he served as a member of the Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee for several years contributing to various aspects of architecture definition and evaluation of technologies for privacy and confidentiality. He is currently working on methods for improving the security, scalability, and privacy of distributed ledgers. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Arizona.

Links

• Talk: Online via Zoom
• Networking: Online – the link will be shared during the Zoom session