Canon
The Blockchain Canon.
A canon is a reading list with a point of view, not a ranking of tokens. Each study on this site says what the paper claimed, what it assumed, and what the live system did afterwards.
How the shelves are arranged
- Privacy: CryptoNote, Zerocoin, Zerocash, RingCT, Mimblewimble.
- Consensus and execution: Ouroboros through Sui, including permissioned Diem as a design, not a live network.
- Interoperability and scaling: Polkadot, Cosmos, Lightning, Plasma, Arbitrum, STARKs, LazyLedger, restaking, Matic checkpoints.
- Markets and credit: Uniswap, Curve, Balancer, 0x, Bancor, THORChain, Compound, Aave, Maker, and Terra as a failure.
- Data, agents, storage, radio, compute: Chainlink, The Graph, Augur, Ocean, Bittensor, Filecoin, Arweave, Helium, Golem, Livepeer, and the enclave and secret-sharing papers.
What a record contains
Author, year, source, the problem, the mechanism, the assumptions, the limits, and a note on what changed. Third-party papers are not republished and are not labelled as Blockchain Lab research.
How to read this page
Research status is named on the page. Primary sources are linked. This is a mechanism and operating note, not investment suitability, legal advice, a security guarantee or an implementation certificate.
- Open the libraryStudies and historic PDFs
- Protocol atlasCompare architectures
- Failure atlasWhere designs broke
- Historic PDFsOriginal files, original URLs
Illustrative commercial design only. This is not legal, tax, investment, employment or securities advice, and it is not an offer to the public, a solicitation to invest, or a promise of funding, equity or returns. Structures vary by venture and must be drafted for the incorporation jurisdiction by qualified startup, tax and securities counsel. Blockchain Lab does not claim to be a licensed investment manager, broker or bank on the basis of this website.