Proof of Authority: a next-generation foundational distributed ledger platform for institutional communication, authorisation and consensus

利益来自于合作，但是信任的界限阻止了个人和组织自由地相互交往，因为利益不一致的风险很高。为了获得社会或经济利益，参与者必须跨越这些信任界限。目前，这需要可信的中介：汇丰银行，eBay，AirBnb或英国政府。中介只有通过网络效应才是可行的。因此，信任成了一种稀缺资源--获取成本高昂，但又容易被滥用。成本归结为核实、报告、审计和对外关系，而这些都是主要的手工任务。数字化已经深刻地改变了商业，从银行等传统行业到物联网等新行业;然而，信任仍然是一种手动的人力密集型活动，成本极高。行业专家估计，仅银行就将高达80%的运营成本用于与信任相关的任务，例如由于缺乏合适的交易平台而导致的交易后验证。新的去中心化区块链技术有可能成为一个新概念的核心：一个将信任商品化的通用机器。根据这笔赠款，我们将开发一个可部署的信任机器平台，该平台基于我们的权威证明（PoA）区块链技术，可以由灵活的多个自主选择的独立方进行操作，这些独立方被授权进行“无信任”合作。Ethcore团队作为以太坊项目的一部分，一直处于技术发展的最前沿。（2014年第二大最成功的众筹活动），这是最近英国政府关于区块链技术的报告中提到的，也是《经济学人》的特色。这笔赠款将支持我们的PoA分布式账本系统的开发-这是金融机构，政府和企业的下一代安全多方交易系统的基础构建块。

Benefits come from working together, but trust boundaries prevent individuals andorganisations from dealing freely with each other, because of the high risk that interests arenot aligned. In order to engage for social or economic gain, actors must cross these trustboundaries. Presently this requires trusted intermediaries: HSBC, eBay, AirBnB, or thegovernment of the UK. Intermediation is viable only through network effects. As such, trustbecomes a scarce resource– expensive to obtain and yet easy to abuse.Costs come down to verification, reporting, auditing, and external relations; all primarilymanual tasks. Digitisation has changed business profoundly, from traditional industries suchas banking to new sectors like IoT; however, trust is still a manual, human-intensive activitywhich comes at incredibly high costs. Industry experts estimate that banks alone spend up to80% of their operational cost on trust-related tasks, e.g. post-transaction verification due to thelack of suitable transaction platforms.New decentralised blockchain technology has the potential to become the core of a newconcept: a universal machine that commoditises trust. Under this grant, we will develop adeployable PoC of a trust-machine platform, based on our Proof-of-Authority (PoA)blockchain technology, which can be operated by a flexible plurality of self-chosenindependent parties who are empowered to collaborate “trustlessly”.The Ethcore team have been at the forefront of technological development as part of theEthereum project (in 2014 the second most successful crowdfunded campaign), which wasnotably mentioned most recently in the UK government report on blockchain technology aswell as featured by the Economist. This grant will support the development of our PoAdistributed ledger system – a foundational building block for next-generation secure multipartytransactional systems for financial institutions, government and enterprise.