Greetings IC3 community,

We just returned from Singapore, where two IC3 members presented their latest research at the White Paper Summit.

Below, we’ll share highlights from the event, media coverage of our DAO research and new VBE dashboard, and important details about upcoming events you won’t want to miss!

New Research

PROF: Protected Order Flow in a Profit-Seeking World

• Introducing PROF (Protected Order Flow), a system designed to mitigate harmful MEV exploitation in DeFi by enforcing transaction order within bundles and ensuring their profitable inclusion in blocks. PROF is not only efficient but backward-compatible with existing PBS systems. PROF can enhance both user outcomes and DeFi stability.

CFT-Forensics: High-Performance Byzantine Accountability for Crash Fault Tolerant Protocols

• CFT-Forensics is an efficient accountability framework for Crash Fault Tolerant (CFT) consensus protocols like Raft. It reduces the communication and storage overhead of existing solutions like PeerReview while offering provable accountability.

CrudiTEE: A Stick-and-Carrot Approach to Building Trustworthy Cryptocurrency Wallets with TEEs

• CrudiTEE, a cryptocurrency wallet that mitigates Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) side-channel attacks using economic incentives. Using penalties and rewards, rudiTEE discourages attackers from exfiltrating signing keys. The system models attacker behavior with a Markov Decision Process (MDP), enabling service providers to fine-tune the reward and penalty system for enhanced security.

Formalizing Soundness Proofs of Linear PCP SNARKs

• A formal framework to improve the rigour of security proofs for a common subclass of SNARKs based on linear PCPs. The authors create a decision procedure to check the soundness of these SNARKs and apply it to formalize several constructions, including Groth '16. This research addresses potential flaws in existing security proofs and helps to ensure SNARK protocols are reliably secure.

Community Developments

White Paper Summit: On September 17, IC3 made its debut at the White Paper Summit in Singapore, an event that brought together engineers, builders, and researchers to network and share ideas under one roof.

IC3 alumni Kushal Babel (Monad Labs, Cornell Tech) and a PhD student James Austgen (Cornell Tech) presented their work, with an introduction by IC3's Executive Director Jim Ballingall.

We engaged in roundtable discussions with student leaders and web3 veterans across Asia. Special thanks to the White Paper Reading Club, led by Cornell Tech alumni Rongxin Zhang, for organizing and hosting the event.

Media Coverage

DAOs Need a Vibe Check: Our latest Op-ed for CoinDesk introduces IC3's research on Voting Bloc Entropy (VBE)— a new family of metrics that are designed to mitigate issues stemming from DAO centralization.

VBE doesn't just measure token holdings in individual wallet addresses but takes into account clusters of token holders that are exhibiting similar voting patterns. Go here to access the full article.

VBE Dashboard

We also unveiled our new dashboard, designed to facilitate comparisons of VBE across different DAOs and enable them to track VBE fluctuations over time.

IC3 researchers believe this tool helps enhance the assessment of voting patterns and provides insights into the true level of decentralization within DAOs.

DYOR Update

DYOR (Do Your Own Research), a mini series in collaboration with The Defiant, broadcasted its final episode in August.

Head to IC3's YouTube channel where you can access all of the episodes, including the latest one that explores the intersection of crypto and AI feat. Professor Ari Juels.

Upcoming Events

New: IC3 is excited to announce that our Winter Retreat 2025 will take place in Switzerland in the New Year.

We'll share more details, including sponsorship opportunities, in the coming weeks. In the meantime, go here to see highlights from our 2024 Winter Retreat.

Plus, IC3 faculty Prof. William Lin Cong (Cornell) will deliver an academic keynote speech at the 2024 Desmarais Global Finance Lectures in Montréal, Canada.

Join him on October 3rd at McGill University for a discussion on the responsible uses of AI in finance. Go here for more details on how to register.

Devcon 7

Sarah Allen, IC3 Research Program Manager, will present our work on Dark DAOs later this year at Devcon in Bangkok, Thailand. You can read more about our DAO research here.

Make sure to follow us on X and LinkedIn to stay up-to-date on IC3 events and research. Thanks for reading!

Best regards, 

Bria Han, IC3 Community Manager

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