IOHK | WHY WE ARE BUILDING CARDANO | 06/28/2017    the use of special purpose MPC will enable low latency interaction without the need for blockchain bloat. Thus, it improves the scale of the system. Cardano’s research efforts towards this library are centralized at our Tokyo Tech laboratory with some assistance from scientists abroad. We call the library “Tartaglia” after a fellow mathematician as well as contemporary of Cardano and expect the first iteration to be available in Q1 of 2018. In the second case, one needs a blockchain with a virtual machine, a set of consensus nodes and a mechanism to enable communication between the two chains. We have begun the process of rigorously formalizing the Ethereum Virtual Machine using the K-framework in 12 partnership with a team from the University of Illinois. The result of this analysis will inform the most optimal way to design a replicated and eventually distributed virtual machine with clear operational semantics and strong guarantees of correct 13 implementation from the specification. In other words, the VM actually does what the code tells it to do with the security risks minimized. There are still unresolved questions about the gas economics proposed by Ethereum and how it relates to work such as Jan Hoffmann et al’s resource aware ML and the broader study of resource estimation for computation. We are also curious about the level of language independence of the virtual machine. For example, the Ethereum project has expressed desire for transition from their current VM to Web Assembly. The next effort is in developing a reasonable programming language to express stateful contracts that will be called as services by decentralized applications. For this task, we have chosen both the approach of supporting the legacy smart contract language Solidity for low assurance applications and developing a new language called Plutus for higher assurance applications requiring formal verification. Like the solidity based Zeppelin project , IOHK will also develop a reference library of Plutus code for application developers to use in their projects. We will also develop a specialized set of tools for formal verification inspired by work from UCSD’s Liquid Haskell project . In terms of consensus, Ouroboros was designed in a sufficiently modular fashion to support smart contract evaluation. Hence, both CSL and CCL will share the same consensus algorithm. 12 Invented by Professor Grigore Rosu et. al., K is a universal framework for language independent machine executable semantics. Prior to our work, it has been used to model C, Java and JavaScript 13 Meaning that different consensus nodes run different smart contracts. Also known as state sharding WHY WE ARE BUILDING CARDANO  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License Page 16 of 44