History of protocol design and quality assurance in Cosmos

Speaker: Zarko Milosevic

Abstract: 
Cosmos (https://cosmos.network/) is an open source blockchain project that enables development of sovereign, decentralised and interconnected applications. It has strong roots in distributed systems and formal verification research, and has since its creation attracted many seasoned researchers that joined the project with the idea of bringing its expertise to real and production-grade systems. This talk will provide overview of distributed systems and formal verification techniques and methodologies used since 2017 in Cosmos, with emphasis on recent development (https://github.com/informalsystems/quint, https://apalache.informal.systems/).

Biography: 
Zarko Milosevic holds master and PhD degrees from EPFL, Switzerland. His research focuses mostly on design and implementation of efficient Byzantine Fault Tolerant protocols and systems. After graduation at EPFL, he spent 4 years working as a distributed system engineer in Switzerland. From 2017 until 2019, in parallel with working on Cosmos, he was an Assistant Professor at Singidunum University in Serbia, teaching distributed and blockchain systems. Since 2017, he has been mostly focused on Cosmos. He has hold several positions within Cosmos ecosystem since 2017 (Research Scientist, Director of Research and Development, Chief Scientist), and at the moment he plays CTO role at Informal Systems (https://informal.systems/), where he is responsible for technical and research strategy and development of several core products (https://cometbft.com/, https://github.com/informalsystems/hermes/, https://github.com/cosmos/gaia, https://apalache.informal.systems/).

Host: Fernando Pedone