Last updated a year ago
UTXO chains need to accelerate their collaborative efforts and remember their common origins
Research active and historical UTXO blockchains, research papers and developers. Build educational materials.
This is the total amount allocated to Wolfram UTxO History&Collaboration.
Key Points
Understanding the historical and present environment is critical for blockchain ecosystems to grow. Many account-based blockchains have added EVM compatibility and now provide a de facto common research infrastructure. UTXO chains need to gather up historical and present information to create a rich archive of materials. This will ensure recognition of meaningful trends of R&D that UTXO chains have in common and help foster a vibrant UTXO research, development and user community.
This UTXO project is one aspect of our new education center, for which we will engage in the creation of deep research, computational data and interviews.
Wolfram Blockchain Labs (WBL) joined the UTXO Alliance in April. One of the initial things we noticed is that there is a significant number of UTXO chains; however, there isn’t a large list of these UTXO blockchain chains. So, we set to work starting to research both active and historical UTXO blockchains.
However, as we began to assemble this list, we thought of what might be next.
Then it came to us, we’ll figure out how to expose this content in different ways that are useful to UTXO Alliance, the Cardano community and the public.
Among these areas for education and information:
This project will also provide information to help expand UTXO cross-chain activity of all types.
I. Research and Discovery Phase
We plan on executing a discovery phase from April until the decision (September). During that time, we will continue to gather our list of active and historical UTXO chains, acquire white papers of those chains and assemble a list of resources.
Please view our supplemental materials (to be added soon) to get a better idea of what we’ve done so far, especially if you have information and research that you could provide.
II. Working Phase
During this phase, we will work on assembling data into formatting where we can discover common details through different blockchains. We will go further by making the various datasets computable as well. We will also finalize how we will conduct interviews of UTXO chain community members.
We’d like to get the Catalyst (and UTXO) community involved to help us write initial versions of some of the glossary terms—and we want to have bounties on these terms so that people are rewarded for their participation.
III. Presentation Phase
We plan to create a simple web application to provide data for users to explore.
Supplemental Information
https://wolfr.am/UTxO-History-Collaboration
The Catalyst Fund9 Cross-Chain Collaboration challenge mentions that it is an “open-ended challenge that welcomes any proposal geared for cross-chain collaboration, co-innovation, and interoperability. These can be any community-led projects, initiatives, solutions, tools, or services. It could mean for instance:”
We feel this idea is explicitly mentioned in the Fund9 Cross-Chain Collaboration challenge. In addition, we plan to include current UTXO Alliance blockchains and potentially help recruit more UTXO blockchains to UTXO Alliance.
“The UTXO Alliance is an initiative created to kickstart collaboration with individuals and organizations working to make the UTXO model more scalable, secure, and interoperable.” You can learn more about the UTXO Alliance here: https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/10/15/utxo-alliance-fostering-innovation-and-collaboration-across-the-blockchain-space
Thus, the entire proposed project will help increase cross-chain possibilities for collaboration. The more UTXO cross-chain possibilities there are, the more UTXO chains will grow—including Cardano.
We have already created a list of more than 150 active and historical UTXO blockchains and are busy filling in the details on those blockchains. Those details we want to fill out include ticker symbols, websites (or their historical websites using archive.org), social media, contact information (developers and community managers/members) and white papers. At present a majority of the chains are Bitcoin forks, but we continue to find other UTxO chains out there.
Another key interest area is the increasingly large collection of UTXO blockchain white papers (and research papers), which are used to update technical information for the community and innovate new features for UTXO chains. Comprehension and careful analysis of these white papers is crucial to maintaining the health not just of Cardano, but other UTXO blockchains. New research papers help provide new ideas and give a sense of the relative importance of problems. Unfortunately, the size of this collection is making it difficult (if not impossible) for most community members to digest the information that is important.
The Wolfram Language provides sophisticated tools for analyzing and visualizing text, both structurally and semantically. These tools and methods would include over two hundred types of entity extraction and advanced deep learning techniques. By providing the option of an automated computation layer between the raw feed of white papers and the community, WBL can remove a significant barrier for active participation.
We are also quite interested in the people involved in different UTXO chains; we’d like to interview as many people as possible to help document the initial reasons behind why they started the different ledgers.
There are few technical issues to execute on this project, and because we have already started the core research gathering, the risks are low. However, low risk does not mean no risk. We have tried to outline the risks here along with how we might mitigate them
Possible risks:
We have created a roughly seven-month timeline for the execution of all items in the plan after the potential award of a grant. This does not include the start of the discovery portion; this began roughly in mid-April as we began the collection of UTXO chains.
We have started this project in advance of the funding; if the project isn’t funded, we will taper the resources put into the project and close it on September 1, 2022, during the discovery phase.
This project would be completed in the following phases:
I. Research and Discovery Phase
Mid-April–August 2022
II. Working Phase
September–December 2022
III. Presentation Development Phase
January–March 2023
Team Costs: 28,500 USD (writing, programming, modeling, design and teaching costs)
Glossary Bounties: 10,000 USD (community-oriented glossary term writing)
Supplies: 5,000 USD (hardware, books and other associated costs)
Marketing & Outreach: 5,000 USD (marketing budget to promote events)
Website Application & Design: 18,500 USD (computable publication costs)
Wolfram Blockchain Labs, through our partners at Wolfram U and Wolfram Research, have significant experience creating educational video content.
In addition to the principal people listed below, Wolfram Blockchain Labs has additional engineers within its blockchain group and has additional resources within our parent company, Wolfram Research.
Leanne Ussher (Economist), Jon Woodard (Research) and Steph Macurdy (Research and Community Outreach), Jesus Hernandez (Programmer) along with other members mentioned in our biography document here:
https://wolfr.am/UTxO-History-Collaboration
In addition to Wolfram Blockchain Labs, we also plan to engage people in the Cardano community with bounties for glossary terms.
Most likely we will not; however, if additional features are requested we might return.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
1. The number of UTXO Alliance interviews
a. The number of viewers of UTXO videos
b. The number of education video viewers
2. The number of community contributions
a. Glossary
b. UTXO blockchain suggestions
The completion of the project will be measured using the following deliverables:
This is a new proposal.
NB: Monthly reporting was deprecated from January 2024 and replaced fully by the Milestones Program framework. Learn more here
We’ve built blockchain study group materials and research documents and have already started UTXO discovery work.