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Happy Friday IC3 Friends😊!
June has been incredible as we welcome two new faculty members and bring together blockchain enthusiasts across academia and industry to our 2023 Blockchain Summer Camp. Don't miss this edition to learn more about our new faculty and see the 2023 camp highlights!
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 | Carla Reyes is an Associate Professor of Law at SMU Dedman School of Law, in Dallas, Texas. Professor Reyes is a nationally recognized leader on issues raised by the intersection of business law and blockchain technology. Professor Reyes served as the Chair of the Texas Work Group on Blockchain Matters from September 2021-November 2022. Professor Reyes was also named an American Bar Foundation Fellow in June 2021 and named one of the Women of Legal Tech 2020, an honor bestowed by the American Bar Association Legal Technology Resource Center. Professor Reyes currently serves as the Associate Research Director of the Permanent Editorial Board of the UCC (a co-appointment with Andrea Tosato, Penn Law), the Research Director for the Uniform Law Commission’s Technology Committee, an Expert Member of the UNIDROIT Work Group on Best Practices for Effective Enforcement, was an Advisor to Joint ALI/ULC Drafting Committee on the Uniform Commercial Code and Emerging Technologies, and was an Expert Member of the UNIDROIT Work Group on Digital Assets and Private Law. Prior to joining SMU Dedman School of Law, Professor Reyes served Michigan State University College of Law as an Assistant Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Law, Technology & Innovation. Prior to teaching law, Professor Reyes practiced law as an associate in the Blockchain Technology and Digital Currency industry group at Perkins Coie LLP. Professor Reyes also contributes to blockchain technology initiatives at Stanford CodeX as a RegTrax Curator, MIT’s Cryptoeconomic Systems program, the University College London’s Blockchain Research Centre as a Research Associate, and the American Bar Association. | | |
 | Will Cong is a Finance Professor and the current holder of the Rudd Family Endowed Professorship in Management at Cornell University. He is also a Department editor at the Management Science, Research Associate at the NBER, founding director of FinTech at Cornell Initiative, (co-)founder of the Digital Economy and Financial Technology (DEFT) Lab and multiple international research forums (e.g., ABFR and CBER), and was formerly a faculty member at the University of Chicago, Kauffman Junior Fellow, Poets & Quants World Best Business School Professor, George P. Shultz Scholar, and Lieberman Fellow at Stanford University. He studies applied economic theory, financial economics, and information economics, with a focus on interdisciplinary topics entailing tokenomics, IO and design of blockchains, DeFi, AI for finance, and how digitization and big data interact with and influence competition, growth, and entrepreneurship. He is the recipient of numerous best paper prizes and grants and has been a highly sought-after keynote speaker at various international conferences and advisor for leading FinTech firms, quant funds, and regulatory agencies around the globe. | | |
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Scaling Smart Contracts via Layer-2 Technologies: Some Empirical Evidence by Lin William Cong (Cornell, IC3), Xiang Hui (Washington University in St. Louis-John M. Olin Business School), Catherine Tucker (MIT), and Luofeng Zhou (Columbia Business School, IC3), accepted at Management Science.
- The authors illustrated the economic implications of a layer-2 scaling solution, which moves information aggregation from on-chain to off-chain peer-to-peer networks. The findings provided initial evidence of how blockchain and smart contracting technologies evolve towards achieving decentralized and scalable trust.
The Sting Framework by Kushal Babel (Cornell, IC3), Nerla Jean-Louis (UIUC, IC3), Mahimna Kelkar (Cornell, IC3), Yunqi Li (UIUC, IC3), Carolina Ortega Perez (Cornell, IC3), Aditya Asgoankar (Ethereum Foundation), Sylvain Bellemare (IC3), Ari Juels (Cornell, IC3), and Andrew Miller (UIUC, IC3).
- TEEs are a growing part of the block-building supply chain in today’s blockchains, but historical vulnerabilities are a cause for concern. The authors offered a powerful protective layer for TEE-based systems and others that need secrecy. The Sting Framework prototype is also a cryptoeconomic complement to the Flashbots SGX Builder.
SoK: Data Sovereignty by Jens Ernstberger (Technical University of Munich), Jan Lauinger (Technical University of Munich), Fatima Elsheimy (Yale University), Liyi Zhou (Imperial College London), Sebastian Steinhorst (Technical University of Munich), Ran Canetti (Boston University), Andrew Miller (UIUC, IC3), Arthur Gervais (UCL, Berkeley RDI), Dawn Song (Berkeley RDI, IC3).
- The authors laid the groundwork for transecting systematization of data sovereignty. They clarified the field by identifying three main areas: (1) decentralized identity, (2) decentralized access control and (3) policy-compliant decentralized computation.
Do You Still Need a Manual Smart Contract Audit? by Isaac David (UCL), Liyi Zhou (Imperial College London, Berkeley RDI), Kaihua Qin (Imperial College London, Berkeley RDI), Dawn Song (Berkeley RDI, IC3), Lorenzo Cavallaro (UCL), Arthur Gervais (UCL, Berkeley RDI).
- The authors presented first-step findings on how Large Language Models (LLMs) can help security audits in smart contracts.
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2023 BLOCKCHAIN CAMP RECAP | |
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The 2023 IC3 Summer Blockchain Camp was an incredible success. We would like to extend a heartfelt shoutout to our generous camp sponsors, Reclaim Protocol by CreatorOS Inc, Fenbushi Capital, and closing party sponsor Chainlink, whose support made this 7-day event possible and furthered IC3’s mission of advancing blockchain technology.
The camp featured an exceptional lineup of speakers who shared their expertise and insights, inspiring and educating participants throughout the event. Our students truly shone as well, delivering captivating talks that showcased their deep knowledge and innovative ideas from IC3 research works. Many of our attendees also team up to work on hackathon projects to learn and innovate.
Last but not the least, none of this would have been possible without the dedicated efforts of the Organizing Committee (Surya Bakshi, Haaroon Yousaf, Lorenz Breidenbach, and Patrick McCorry), who meticulously planned every aspect of the camp to create a meaningful and enriching experience for all attendees.
A detailed summary will be posted on our website shortly.
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NEW! INTERVIEW SERIES
FOUNDERS IN WEB3
IC3 is excited to announce the upcoming launch of our latest video series, "Founders in Web3." In this entrepreneurship program, we feature pioneers and leaders in the blockchain space as they share their journey and valuable experiences with our community. The first episode features Ariah Klages-Mundt (Cornell, IC3) from Gyroscope (building self-stabilizing, "all-weather" reserve-backed stablecoin) talking about key concepts, developments of stablecoin & DeFi, his academia and startup journey. An early alpha version of Gyroscope was developed as an IC3 Blockchain Camp project. Watching the full video below or on Youtube.

Moderators: Kushal Babel (Cornell/IC3 PhD Student), Bria Han (IC3 Community Manager)
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Stay tuned for our next episode with Emin Gün Sirer, Founder and CEO of Ava Labs! | |
The Science of Blockchain Conference (SBC) 2023: Co-organized by the Stanford Center for Blockchain Research, IC3 and Berkeley RDI, we have an exceptional lineup of Program Chairs including: Prof. Dan Boneh (Stanford, CBR), Prof. Dawn Song (UC Berkeley, RDI, IC3), Prof. Ari Juels (Cornell, IC3). | |
Crypto 2023: Crypto 2023 will be at UCSB in Santa Barbara, California from August 19 to August 24, 2023. IC3 faculty Sarah Meiklejohn, alum Philipp Jovanovic and their team will deliver the following presentation: Bingo: Adaptivity and Asynchrony in Verifiable Secret Sharing and Distributed Key Generation. Registration is open here! |
Chainlink SmartCon 2023: Get ready for IC3 industry partner Chainlink's signature event SmartCon in Barcelona, Spain from October 2-3, 2023. Ticket registration can be found here!
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Paper Submission
The international conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT) is accepting papers about the latest developments in technologies related to novel financial infrastructure such as cryptocurrencies and their applications, blockchains, decentralized finance and exchanges. Papers may present advances in the theory, design, implementation, analysis, verification, or empirical evaluation and measurement of relevant systems. See topics of interest and submission details here.
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Please send any new research or presentations to jh2584@cornell.edu to be included in the next research update. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!
Best wishes,
Bria Han
IC3 Community Manager
LinkedIn | Twitter | initc3.org
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The Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3)
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