Swiss Engineering Ticino awards Jacques Dafflon thesis on blockchain
Institutional Communication Service
8 April 2019
The Prize 2019 Swiss Engineering Ticino was held on March 21. In the category dedicated to newly graduates from the Masters at USI Faculty of Informatics, the award went to Jacques Dafflon, for his thesis “A New Advanced Token Standard For The Ethereum Blockchain”.
The award ceremony was held in the hall “Le tre vele” O.T.A.F. in Sorengo. Jacques Dafflon earned this year a Master of Science in Informatics. The thesis that won him the award was written under the supervision of Prof. Cesare Pautasso and proposes technical improvements to Ethereum.
What is Ethereum
Ethereum is a decentralised platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third-party interference. These apps run on a custom built blockchain.
A smart contract is a computer protocol intended to digitally facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract while making it partially or fully self executing, without the need of a middleman, and therefore lowering counterparty risks.
Operations based on such contracts can be applied in several fields, from transactions in crypto currency, to registration of domains, from voting systems, to crowdfunding platforms, up to intellectual property protection. Ethereum is sponsored by the Ethereum foundation in Switzerland.
The improvements proposed by the thesis
After analysing the shortcomings and defects of the ERC20 standard used in the management of these "intelligent contracts", Jacques Dafflon's thesis proposes two new standards, ERC777 and ERC820. While maintaining compatibility with the previous standard, these standards significantly improve safety and reliability aspects, reducing the possibility of errors.
In addition to demonstrating a deep knowledge of the state of the art, the proposals formulated in the thesis have passed the scrutiny of a very selective community - that of Ethereum - and were presented at the international conference Ethcc (Ethereum Community Conference), held in Paris in March 2018.
The jury of the Prize Swiss Engineering Ticino (an award promoted by the homonymous foundation) concluded that Jacque Dafflon's thesis was "very interesting and scientifically relevant", complimenting also the way in which the topics were presented.
Sources used: Ethereum, Wikipedia.
