Last April, Alysson Bessani and João Sousa, two integrated members of LASIGE, started a year-long industry-funded project with NEC Labs Europe targeting the design and implementation of efficient Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols for permission blockchains. The project aims to improve the robustness of a fast proprietary protocol from NEC, the implementation of a protocol developed at LASIGE a few years ago to serve as a backup for this fast protocol, and the integration between these two. This project is expected to be only the beginning of a long-term collaboration between LASIGE and NEC Labs Europe for designing a new generation of blockchains, more secure, efficient and with high performance.