Greetings IC3 Friends😊! 

Welcome to the latest IC3 newsletter, packed with updates on the cutting-edge research and events happening at our community. This edition covers our new research from Complete Knowledge to stablecoin monetary policy, upcoming summer camp, hackathon, industry partner activities, grant nomination, and so much more! Enjoy reading! 😎

UPCOMING EVENTS

IC3 Summer Blockchain Camp: We are thrilled to announce that registration for the 2023 IC3 Summer Blockchain Camp is now open! This year, the camp will be held at the Cornell Tech Campus in New York City from June 12th to June 18th. We invite IC3 members and interested parties from academia and industry to participate in this exciting event. This year we plan to highlight research on DeFi, cryptography, cryptoeconomics, NFTs, metaverse, CBDCs, DAOs, public goods and more. Please note that special accommodation discounts at Graduate Hotel located on Cornell Tech campus are available on a first-come, first-served basis. Register here to secure your spot and take advantage of this incredible experience!

Summer Camp Sponsorship Opportunity: Co-create an unforgettable summer camp experience with us by becoming sponsors! If you are interested in sponsoring the 2023 IC3 Summer Blockchain Camp, please fill out this Sponsorship Interest Form. We will get back to you for more information on sponsorship levels and benefits. We look forward to partnering with you to make this year's camp a success! Please note that this form ONLY for non-IC3 members/partners, existing IC3 Partners are invited to participate regardless of camp-specific sponsorship.

Cornell Blockchain Conference 2023: Cornell Blockchain Conference is back in Cornell Tech campus on April 21st. IC3 Co-director Ari Juels, together with distinguished IC3 alumni Emin Gün Sirer (Founder & CEO of Ava Labs) and Steven Goldfeder (Co-Founder & CEO, Offchain Labs) will be sharing valuable insights across academia and industry. We are excited to announce that IC3 is offering special discount to our newsletter subscribers. Get $50 off your General Admission Ticket with promo code: IC350OFF here! Sign up with .edu email address and ONLY claim the code if you can confirm in-person attendance in New York City.

ConsensusDay 2023: Join IC3 industry partner Protocol Labs Research for ConsensusDay 2023, a virtual 1-day experience on June 5, 2023 for individuals and organizations across academia and industry interested in consensus research and adjacent topics within the broader distributed systems field. Check out the research submission opportunities and register here!

Avalanche Summit II: IC3 industry partner Ava Labs is hosting the second Avalanche Summit at Barcelona, Spain from May 3-May 5, 2023. This year's summit will again feature great keynote speeches, panel discussions, and networking opportunities. Join IC3 alumni, former co-director Emin Gün Sirer, founder and CEO of Ava Labs and his wonderful team to vision a better decentralized future. Get tickets here!

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENTS

Self-Custody: With a Little Help From Chainlink DECO:

Chainlink Chief Scientist Ari Juels discusses how Chainlink DECO can simplify key management by allowing users to securely recover crypto keys through authentication to trusted websites. This technology could help increase the adoption of self-custody and improve security in the decentralized ecosystem.

Ariah Klages-Mundt (GyroScope, IC3) discusses the potential risks of stablecoins like USDC, particularly in relation to the recent bank run events triggered by Silicon Valley Bank. Published on IC3 Medium.

Deconstructing Rollups: Motivated by Kelvin Fichter's (OP Labs) ETHGlobal talk, Patrick McCorry (PISA Research, IC3) has taken a deep dive into the concept of rollups to explore whether they should be defined based on a validating bridge or a community perspective.

Decentralized crypto needs you: to be a geographical decentralization maxi: Phil Daian (Flashbots, IC3) discusses trends in MEV that could lead to centralization and weaken the core mission and value proposition of cryptocurrency. The post argues that the only way to avoid this outcome is through geographic decentralization. It also explores the relationship between geographic decentralization and privacy, which the author believes will be a significant economic phenomenon in the next decade of MEV evolution.

ZKP/Web3 Hackathon: UC Berkeley RDI is hosting a new ZKP/web3 hackathon from March 1-May 2, 2023, virtual & in-person participation open to the public. Judges include IC3 members Dawn Song (UC Berkeley), Andrew Miller (UIUC), Patrick McCorry (PISA Research), IC3 Alumnus Fan Zhang (Yale). Signup here to win prizes up to $200K+!

Blockchain + TEES Workshop: Interested in learning blockchains and Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs)? Mark your calendar for April 3rd and 4th for a serial workshop featuring Andrew Miller and Ittay Eyal, IC3 Associate Directors. Register here!

Complete Knowledge by James Austgen (Cornell, IC3), Kushal Babel (Cornell, IC3), Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum) , Phil Daian (Flashbots, IC3), Ari Juels (Cornell, IC3) and Mahimna Kelkar (Cornell, IC3): 

• The authors introduce a new cryptographic notion called proofs of complete knowledge (CK). They also report on a prototype that offers a path to making CK practical for use with smartphones. CK has been designed to solve threats posed by TEEs and MPC. CK can tackle encumbrance-based attacks and restore the idea of knowledge being attributable to a single entity or individual. The researchers believed that CK can be practical in many ways and welcome collaboration in realizing this. See an open version of CK tools here.

SGXonerated: Finding (and Partially Fixing) Privacy Flaws in TEE-based Smart Contract Platforms Without Breaking the TEE by Nerla Jean-Louis (UIUC), Yunqi Li (UIUC), Yan Ji (Cornell, IC3), Harjasleen Malvai (UIUC, IC3), Thomas Yurek (UIUC), Sylvain Bellemare (Cornell, IC3), Andrew Miller (UIUC, IC3):

• The authors identified and illustrated additional privacy risks in TEE-based blockchains, particularly in the Secret Network, without breaking the TEE itself.

Designing Autonomous Markets for Stablecoin Monetary Policy by Ariah Klages-Mundt (IC3, Gyroscope), Steffen Schuldenzucker (University of Zurich, Gyroscope):

• The authors developed a primary market automated market maker (P-AMM) for stablecoins that helps maintain stability and long-term viability. This P-AMM is designed to achieve several desirable properties, including bounded loss for both the protocol and stablecoin holders. The author also discussed the efficient on-chain implementation of P-AMM.

Practical Asynchronous High-threshold Distributed Key Generation and Distributed Polynomial Sampling by Sourav Das (UIUC), Zhuolun Xiang (Aptos), Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias (IST Austria, IC3 Alum), Ling Ren (UIUC): 

• The authors propose a new protocol for high-threshold asynchronous distributed key generation for threshold cryptosystems based on discrete logarithms. The protocol is efficient and uses a novel mechanism for distributed polynomial sampling that allows each node to learn only one evaluation point on the polynomial. The paper suggests that improving the primitives used in their protocol would lead to an improved distributed key generation protocol.

tlock: practical timelock encryption from threshold BLS by Nicolas Gailly (Protocol Labs, IC3 Alum), Kelsey Melissaris (Aarhus University), Yolan Romailler (Protocol Labs):

• The authors present a practical implementation of timelock encryption, where a cipher-text can only be decrypted after a specified time has passed. The authors also provide an open-source implementation of the scheme and a live web page that can be used in production, relying on the League of Entropy network as a distributed public randomness beacon service. 

Randomization and Consensus - synchronous binary agreement for minority omission failures by Ittai Abraham (VMWare Research):

• The article explores the use of randomness in achieving consensus by illustrating a simple randomized consensus algorithm including a simple weak coin protocol including a simple weak coin protocol. The author also discusses various approaches to incorporating randomness into consensus algorithms. See details in Ittai Abraham (VMWare Research) Tweet thread.

OPPORTUNITIES & JOBS

Industry Partner Opening:

JP Morgan Chase is hiring web3 developers in Greece for the Onyx Team! Onyx is opening an Innovation Hub in Athens following JPM’s investment in Viva Wallet. Onyx Athens will focus on digital identity, and later expand into privacy tech. Apply here!

Academic Position:

IC3 Alum Philipp Jovanovic at the Information Security Research Group of University College London offers a full-time PhD position in applied cryptography under his supervision. This 4-year position is fully funded and has a starting date of September/October 2023 or shortly thereafter. See application details here!

Stay tuned for more IC3 news! Please send any new research or presentations to jh2584@cornell.edu to be included in the next research update.

Best wishes, 

Bria Han

IC3 Community Manager

Copyright © 2017-2023

The Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3)