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=nil; Foundation

What is =nil; Foundation?

Mikhail Komarov

29 Sep 2021

What is =nil; Foundation?

=nil; Foundation was established in April of 2018 to facilitate cryptography and databases research and development.

=nil; Foundation Initiatives

=nil; Foundation supports projects which are established by the Foundation itself and ones established by third-parties as well.

Initial set of projects supported by the =nil; Foundation contains:

=nil; Crypto3 Cryptography Suite

Cryptography suite project was established to provide architecturally elegant and efficient modern cryptography primitives implementation along with more tranditional constructions implemented in the same way. Crypto3 suite eventually became the foundation for all cryptography research and development within the Foundation, reducing security risks of misimplementation or a design flaw.

=nil; `DROP DATABASE *

=nil; `DROP DATABASE * is a database management system capable of working with currently exising protocol as with regular databases, providing them with traditional DBMS features:

  • Query language (declarative SQL-alike and imperative one).
  • Protocol state partitioning. Allows to reduce protocol deployment and maintenance costs.
  • Cross-database queries. Allows to manage the data within different databases.
  • Database-level replication protocol implementation. Allows to replicate databases with very different replication protocols to the same DBMS instance.

=nil; Foundation Teams

Being an R&D non-profit means to have associated teams to carry the expertise and perform the actual research. That is why =nil; Foundation has several associated teams which help to facilitate the results.

=nil; Crypto3 Team

To handle all the R&D happening around =nil; Crypto3 Cryptography Suite, a cryptography-dedicated =nil; Crypto3 team was established. It’s interests vary from applied compexity-theory research and cryptography schemes constructions and implementations development to cryptography and protocol security audits. More on that can be noticed at crypto3.nil.foundation.

=nil; Database Team

Database team was established to facilitate the =nil; `DROP DATABASE * R&D. It’s particular functionality beings with the DBMS core development (replication protocol interfaces standartization, query language changes, data storage layer implementation) to developing initial set of applications and replication protocols (e.g. Bitcoin-family replication protocol adapter). More about that can be found at dbms.nil.foundation.