IC3: Advancing the science and applications of blockchains

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by IC3 on September 05, 2025
The following blog post was originally published on 2 July 2018, in Hacking, Distributed (HD) — the site (run by Gün Sirer) where IC3 blog posts were originally published. When HD went offline, the post disappeared. We’re reviving it now, seven years later, because its ideas have proven to be so prescient. Its focus was on how trusted execution environments (TEEs) could be used to attack voting systems through private smart-contracts for bribery. For this idea, we coined the term Dark DAOs.
by IC3 on June 23, 2025
Risk-Aware Restaking took first place at this year’s IC3 Blockchain Camp hackathon. We sat down with project lead Roi Bar-Zur (Technion, IC3) to find out what they built, the technical hurdles they overcame during the hackathon, and what’s next for their project.
by Deepak Maram (Mysten Labs, IC3 Alum), Mahimna Kelkar (Cornell Tech, IC3), and Ittay Eyal (Technion, IC3) on November 06, 2024
The authors examine interactive authentication mechanisms that could enhance wallet security, helping crypto users transact more safely.
Older blogs...

Events

January 5-9, 2026
Pack your skis — we’re heading back to Hotel Terrace in Engelberg, Switzerland, for the 2026 Winter Retreat!
August 4-6, 2025
The conference focuses on technical innovations in the blockchain ecosystem, and brings together researchers and practioners working in the space. We aim to foster collaboration among the different communities working on blockchain protocols, cryptography, distributed systems, secure computing, and crypto-economics.
Tuesday August 5, 2025
Thank you to all who joined us for the IC3 Members & Friends Reception at SBC 2025!Held at Gather, an iconic venue where locavores come for creative Californian fare made with seasonal ingredients & West Coast wines. This event provided an opportunity for IC3 academic researchers, industry partners and invited guests to mingle and discuss the latest in blockchain research.
More events

News

Featured Projects

Prrr: Personal Random Rewards for Blockchain Reporting

Smart contracts, the stateful programs running on blockchains, often rely on reports. Publishers are paid to publish these reports on the blockchain. Designing protocols that incentivize timely reporting is the prevalent reporting problem. But existing solutions face a security-performance tradeoff - Relying on a small set of trusted publishers introduces centralization risks, while allowing open publication results in an excessive number of reports on the blockchain. We identify the root cause of this trade-off to be the standard symmetric reward design, which treats all reports equally. We prove that no symmetric-reward mechanism can overcome the trade-off. We present Personal Random Rewards for Reporting (Prrr), a protocol that assigns random heterogeneous values to reports. We call this novel mechanism-design concept Ex-Ante Synthetic Asymmetry. To the best of our knowledge, Prrr is the first game-theoretic mechanism (in any context) that deliberately forms participant asymmetry. Prrr employs a second-pricestyle settlement to allocate rewards, ensuring incentive compatibility and achieving both security and efficiency. Following the protocol constitutes a Subgame-Perfect Nash Equilibrium, robust against collusion and Sybil attacks. Prrr is applicable to numerous smart contracts that rely on timely reports. For further details, please check out our Projects Page.

Keywords:
Smart Contracts
Sybil
Rewards
Blockchain

More projects:

  • B-Privacy: Defining and Enforcing Privacy in Weighted Voting
  • Breaking Omertà: On Threshold Cryptography, Smart Collusion, and Whistleblowing
  • PicoGRAM: Practical Garbled RAM from Decisional Diffie-Hellman
  • Cycles Protocol: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Clearing System
  • Crypto ATMs: Material Effects of Virtual Currencies
Even more projects...

Opportunities

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