Greetings! Welcome to the IC3 Newsletter.

This is an outreach to keep the blockchain community aware of IC3 innovations, events, news, publications, and other service to the community.

UPCOMING IC3 EVENTS

REGISTER TODAY - IC3 BLOCKCHAIN SUMMER CAMP - July 26 to August 1, 2020, VIRTUAL!

Join us for the 5th Annual IC 3 Blockchain Camp! Due to Covid-19, this annual 7-day experience will be virtual. Our Camp technical committee of Surya Bakshi, Tyler Kell and Patrick McCorry is preparing another unique immersive weeklong coding and learning experience.

In addition to the tech talks, panels and projects, we are planning VR-enabled social activities, games, chat rooms, birds-of-a-feather discussions, and more.

Panels include Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), Production-Ready Software, ZKP vs. Fraud Proofs, and Blockchains for Social Good.

We will offer two overlapping tracks: a presentation track and a coding track.

The schedule was set based upon nominal awake hours across our campuses, i.e., the presentation program starts at 9am in Berkeley and ends at midnight in Haifa. Coding teams will work asynchronously, so don't let your time zone dissuade you from joining a team!

Option 1: The coding track includes all presentations, virtual social activities, and participation in a weeklong coding project on a 5 - 10 person team. This is limited to IC3 sponsors, faculty, staff, students. In the coding track, you can expect to engage with leaders in the blockchain community - faculty, architects, developers, students.

Option 2: The presentation track will be open to the public with many of the daily talks and panels the participants in the coding track join. 

Both tracks require pre-registration. Please see the agenda and registration form .

For examples of what to expect, and testimonials by leaders in the blockchain community, please see the summary of the 2019 Blockchain Camp.
Tyler Kell, Patrick McCorry , and Surya Bakshi
2020 Blockchain Camp - Technical Committee
REGISTER TODAY - IC3 WEBINAR: CONNECTING BLOCKCHAINS TO THE REAL WORLD by Fan Zhang, July 7, 2020 @ 2PM EDT

Register for this presentation by Fan Zhang, a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Cornell University, advised by Prof. Ari Juels. His research interest is in building secure systems that empower and protect their users from insecure and centralized infrastructure by leveraging cryptography, blockchains, and trusted execution environments (TEEs).
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF BLOCKCHAINS (TPBC 2020), July 15, 11AM EDT

Incentive Attacks on Smart Contracts and Blockchains by Prof. Ittay Eyal, Technion and IC3 Associate Director

See also talks by Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias, EPFL and IC3 (presentation title TBA) and Ittai Abraham, VMware Research. Please see the TPBC conference site for additional info, the schedule of online talks, and registration.
COMMUNITY IMPLEMENTATIONS

Oasis Labs Launches the Amber Network o n June 17, 2020 by IC3 faculty Prof. Dawn Song, UC Berkeley, and her collaborators . T he Amber Network is a release candidate for the Oasis Network Mainnet.
IC3 at RECENT CONFERENCES

41st IEEE SYMPOSIUM ON SECURITY & PRIVACY, May 18-20, 2020

Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning in Decentralized Exchanges, Miner Extractable Value, and Consensus Instability   Philip Daian (Cornell Tech), Steven Goldfeder (Cornell Tech), Tyler Kell (Cornell Tech), Yunqi Li (UIUC), Xueyuan Zhao (Carnegie Mellon University), Iddo Bentov (Cornell Tech), Lorenz Breidenbach (ETH Zurich), Ari Juels (Cornell Tech) Video of Presentation
 
Jiaheng Zhang (UC Berkeley), Tiancheng Xie (UC Berkeley), Yupeng Zhang (Texas A&M University), Dawn Song (UC Berkeley)

CONSENSUS 2020, May 11-15, 2020

This year's speakers included several IC3 sponsors and faculty (alphabetically): Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum), Ria Bhutoria and Amanda Fabiano (Fidelity), Sergey Nazorov (Chainlink), Prof. Emin Gün Sirer (Cornell, Ava), and Prof. Dawn Song (UC Berkeley, Oasis).
THIRD INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON FOUNDATIONS AND APPLICATIONS OF BLOCKCHAIN 2020, May 1, 2020

Ethan Cecchetti (Cornell University), Siqiu Yao (Cornell University), Haobin Ni (Cornell University), Andrew Myers (Cornell University) 

Keynote: The Journey to Libra Blockchain Core and Beyond
Dahlia Malkhi (Research Lead at Novi) 
Ethan Cecchetti, Cornell
Dahlia Malkhi, Novi

RESEARCH PREPRINTS
(Please see our rece n t Research Newsletter on June 10 )


RECENT BLOGS

by Itay Tsabary, Matan Yechieli, and Ittay Eyal on June 22, 2020

In this post, we outline the attack and its analysis, and the MAD-HTLC solution.

by Benjamin Chan and Elaine Shi on May 14, 2020

In this post, we described an extraordinarily simple blockchain protocol called Streamlet. Consensus is a complex problem and has been studied since the 1980s. More recently, blockchain research has spawned many new works aiming for performance and ease-of-implementation. However, simple, understandable protocols remain elusive, and that's where Streamlet comes in.

IC3 in the NEWS - May-June 2020
(please see our Press page for additional mentions of IC3 in the News)




Mysterious wallet again sends $ 2.6 million transaction fe e  by Our Bitcoin News on June 17, 2020







ChainLink Price Analysis - A new LINK/USD record high nears  by Brave New Coin on June 08, 2020


Emin Gün Sirer: Blockchain won’t fix this  by Decrypt on June 06, 2020








K-12 Education from Cornell Tech  by Cornell Chronicle on May 05, 2020

Hodler’s Digest, April 27–May 3  by The Bulletin Time on May 03, 2020


Blockchains are an Extinction-Level Event  by The Defiant on May 01, 2020

Please feel free to contact us for more info on these items.

Best,

Jim Ballingall
Executive Director
The Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3) 
cel:  408-212-1035
Copyright © 2017-2020 The Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3)
The IC3 2019 Fall Retreat attendees gathered (above) for a group photo at the end of the day at in the JPM Metrotech Center, Brooklyn, NY. The Retreat included IC3 faculty and students from Cornell, Cornell Tech, ETH Zurich, EPFL, UC Berkeley, UCL, UIUC, and the Technion.