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by Surya Bakshi (UIUC, IC3, Offchain Labs), Sarah Allen (IC3, Flashbots), Lorenz Breidenbach (IC3, Chainlink Labs), Jim Ballingall (IC3), Haaroon Yousaf (IC3), Patrick McCorry (IC3, Arbitrum Foundation), Giannis Kaklamanis (Yale University), Vivian Jeng (Ethereum Foundation), Jayamine Alupotha (IC3, University of Bern), Mariarosaria Barbaraci (IC3, University of Bern), Abhimanyu Rawat (UPF Barcelona) on June 20, 2024
The team behind Boquila, a proof of concept to obscure identifiable information from third-party websites, took the top spot at this year’s hackathon. We sat down with Mariarosaria Barbaraci and Jayamine Alupotha, two members of the winning team, to talk about what they built and their experience at this year’s IC3 Blockchain Camp.
by Philipp Schneider (University of Bern, IC3) with contributions by Ignacio Amores-Sesar (University of Bern, IC3), and Christian Cachin (University of Bern, IC3) on May 17, 2024
In a three part series, we look at the “Snow” protocols that address the fundamental consensus problem and were introduced in a whitepaper by a group associated with AvaLabs that pioneered the Avalanche blockchain infrastructure. This is a post that consists of three parts. Part 1 appears here, part 2 and part 3 appear on the Crypto@Bern blog. This first part gives an overview of these Snow protocols and a summary of our findings.
by Orestis Alpos (University of Bern), Ignacio Amores-Sesar (University of Bern, IC3), Christian Cachin (University of Bern, IC3), Michelle Yeo (National University of Singapore) on May 10, 2024
The problems of maximal-extractable value (MEV) and front-running attacks have plagued decentralized finance (DeFi) in the recent years. We tackle the problem of sandwich attacks in general and introduce a protocol to transform any blockchain consensus algorithm into a new one that has the same security, but in which sandwich attacks are no longer profitable. Our protocol is fully decentralized with no trusted third parties or heavy cryptographic primitives. It makes existing blockchains resilient to such attacks in exchange for increased latency until consensus becomes final and by adding a small computational overhead.
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August 7-9, 2024
Thank you to everyone who participated in the Science of Blockchain Conference (SBC) 2024!
June 10-16, 2024
Thank you to everyone who participated in the 2024 IC3 Blockchain Camp!
January 8-11, 2024
Thank you to all who joined us for the IC3 Winter Retreat 2024 at the Eurotel Victoria in Les Diablerets, Switzerland!
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Featured Projects

PROF: Protected Order Flow in a Profit-Seeking World

Users of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications face significant risks from adversarial actions that manipulate the order of transactions to extract value from users. Such actions—an adversarial form of what is called maximal extractable value (MEV)—impact both individual outcomes and the stability of the DeFi ecosystem. MEV exploitation, moreover, is being institutionalized through an architectural paradigm known Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS). This work introduces a system called PROF (Protected Order Flow) that is designed to limit harmful forms of MEV in existing PBS systems. For further details, please check out our Projects Page.

Keywords:
DeFi
MEV
PBS
PROF

More projects:

  • VFIX: Facilitating Software Maintenance of Smart
  • PayOff: A Regulated Central Bank Digital Currency with Private Offline Payments
  • SCIF: A Language for Compositional Smart Contract Security
  • SOK: Programmable Privacy in Distributed Systems
  • Aegis: A Decentralized Expansion Blockchain
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