We are a blockchain technology that uses formal methods to increase the scalability and security of smart contracts.
Our flagship product will make cryptocurrency payments as easy, fast, and reliable as using a debit card. So cryptocurrency can now be used for making everyday purchases like grocery, gas, and buying flowers for your mother.
...all while remaining distributed, trustless, and secure.
Until now, speed, affordability, and security have not been possible without compromising one or the other. Even if this were achieved, it still isn’t enough to launch cryptocurrencies as mainstream forms of payment.
Even most trusted blockchain cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin process about 10 transactions per second, with full confirmation taking up to an hour.
All blockchain cryptocurrencies are dealing with some version of this problem, making it impossible to scale and achieve widespread market penetration.
Legicash takes advantage of formal methods to develop smart contracts that bind blockchains together. Our flagship contract creates the blockchain analog of debit cards, enabling payment within seconds on a side-chain without sacrificing the security guarantees of a trustless decentralized consensus.
We accomplish this with three key innovations.
First, we accept that consensus can be slow and expensive. This is ok because consensus only matters when things go wrong. Just like you don't go to court every time you buy or sell a cup of coffee, you don't need to go to consensus for every transaction.
Second, we use Repudiable Facilitators to shoulder the liability for fraudulent transactions. They put up a bond for 5x the amount of liquid transactions. Facilitators then validate transactions in compliance with local regulations and make the transfer for a small fee.
Finally, we invented a way to write more elaborate smart contracts using formal methods to automatically enforce the accountability of all participants.
In the long run, our goal is to provide the replacement for debit card purchases, built on top of a decentralized and trustless ledger.
Our approach views the consensus at the heart of all cryptocurrencies as a necessarily slow and expensive mechanism to settle disputes.
Transactions flagged as fraudulent are arbitrated by the consensus and are cleared over a few days.
This allows most transactions to be validated within milliseconds.
Repudiable facilitators (RFs) are service providers that collect nominal fees for each transaction.
They post a bond to guarantee payment recipients that their transactions are valid within a matter of seconds, not hours.
Also, facilitators can collect identifying information from their users in compliance with local regulations.
We take special precautions to ensure that RFs can’t break the overall system or be broken by the rest of the system.
We hold RFs accountable both locally and globally in the event of failure, including fraud, hardware failure, seizure, etc.
RFs have to post a bond 5x the amount of liquid transactions they are liable for
RFs are repudiable by user consensus and smart law
Presently, if Alice wants to pay Bob 5 coin, they both have to wait for the consensus to validate the transaction before Bob can walk away.
With Legicash, Alice pays Bob 5 coin and then Bob asks Alice’s RF if the transaction is valid.
The RF assumes liability and validates the transaction in a matter of seconds.
Bob can walk away knowing that he is guaranteed funds since the liability of the transaction has now been passed on to the RF.
In the future, your local Starbucks might accept payments via Certified Facilitators, those that are reputable and comply with local regulation
Our combined understanding of both technology and economics uniquely positions Legicash to disrupt the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
François-René Rideau is an alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure (rue d’Ulm). He has a background as a Researcher in Computer Science (Programming Language Semantics and Distributed Systems). Formerly a Software Engineer at IDEALX, ITA Software, Google, and Bridgewater Associates, he is also an early member of the Tezos community.
Chris is a tech entrepreneur, passionate about all things software. At East Coast Product, Chris leads his team to build the right digital product to get growth stage startups to their next milestone. Prior to East Coast Product, Chris was the CTO at Vsnap. In his free time, this tech guru is an advisor at Harvard Business School, Resilient Coders, and Techstars.
й Paul has extensive experience in software engineering using functional programming and formal methods in both academic and industrial settings, including work on the internals of the Coq proof assistant.
Carla served as the VP of Operations for East Coast Product. Before ECP, Carla was a Techstars associate and worked at Harvard University in scholarship management and pedagogical development. She graduated from Brown University in 2010 and serves on the Brown Club of Boston Board of Directors. In her spare time she volunteers at Resilient Coders and organizes Stitch & Pitch, a crafting meetup for those in tech.
Max is the Chief Technology Officer of ThriveHive, where they empower local business owners to take charge of their business growth, combining human guidance with easy-to-use technology to make marketing simple, effective, and affordable for small and mid-sized businesses.
Max joined the company in March 2016 via the acquisition of his startup, where he was Co-Founder and CEO. Max is a former small business owner who has worked as a product manager intern for the Kindle team at Amazon and has held engineering roles in industrial automation and artificial intelligence research. Max is passionate about empowering others through data-driven marketing technology. Max holds a BSEE from the University of Costa Rica and an MBA with a certificate for Innovation and Entrepreneurship from MIT Sloan.
Pierre-Yves is an Assistant Professor at Ecole Polytechnique. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the École Polytechnique, France, in 2008. In 2016, he joined the Computer Science Department of the École Polytechnique (France). Prior, he was a researcher at the IMDEA Software Institute from 2013, after a post-doctoral position at the Microsoft-INRIA Joint Lab in Paris, France and at the LIAMA institute in Beijing, China. Pierre-Yves’ research interests include formal proofs, proof assistants and their related type theory, certification of cryptographic algorithms, mathematical proofs, and program verification.
He actively participates in the development of Coq proof assistant extensions and libraries and also focuses on the development of tools to develop secure implementations of cryptography. He is one of the main authors of the EasyCrypt proof assistant (a toolset for reasoning about relational properties of probabilistic computations with adversarial code) and of the Jasmin toolset (a framework for developing high-speed and high-assurance cryptographic software).
Thomas Hardjono is the CTO of MIT Connection Science and Technical Director of the MIT Trust::Data Consortium. Passionate about the Internet infrastructure, equitable access and open source, he devoted several years at MIT running the MIT Kerberos Consortium. Prior to this he was a Distinguished Engineer at Bay Networks, Principal Scientist at VeriSign PKI, and held CTO roles at several start-ups. With a background in cryptography, for the past two decades Thomas has been at the forefront of several identity, trust and cybersecurity initiatives in industry, ranging from network multicast security, IoT Security, trusted computing to scalable identity systems and interoperable blockchains. Thomas has authored several technical papers, patents and books covering cryptography, networking, identity and blockchain security.
Rick has over 15 years of experience as an architect and consultant, and has created several well-known blockchain architectures since 2014. He specializes in mechanism design with a focus on federated proof of stake consensus systems. Many of his projects have also entailed components of cross chain asset exchange.
