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AI systems are breaking an internet that was designed at human-scale — by making it cheaper than ever to coordinate, transact, and generate voice, video, and text that are increasingly indistinguishable from human activity. We’re already beset w
Distributed Trust is gaining rapid popularity in industry, yet forces users to interact with a totally ordered ledger through bespoke, restricted query interfaces. This limits throughput and hurts programmability. In this talk, Natacha Crooks (UC Berkeley, Azure Systems Research) introduces Pesto, which instead recognizes that most append-only ledgers are really trying to build a database, but a database with distributed, decentralized trust. Pesto leverages ACID transactions to scalable implement the abstraction of a trusted shared log in the presence of Byzantine actors. Unlike traditional BFT approaches, Pesto executes non-conflicting operations in parallel and commits transactions in a single round-trip during fault-free executions. Pesto offers full SQL compatibility and can act as a drop-in replacement to traditional SQL databases.
About the presenter
Natacha is an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley and a visiting researcher at Azure Systems Research (Security & Privacy). She works at the intersection of distributed systems and databases. Most recently, she is focused on developing scalable database and storage systems with strong integrity guarantees. Her work has been deployed in Signal as well as several blockchain companies including Sei, Commonware, Somnia (Improbable), Hyle and B-Harvest.
About a16z crypto research
a16z crypto research is a multidisciplinary lab that works closely with our portfolio companies and others toward solving the important problems in the space, and toward advancing the science and technology of the next generation of the internet.
More about us: a16z.com/2022/04/21/announcing-a16z-crypto-research
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