About Our Initiative

IC3 is an initiative of faculty members at Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, Cornell Tech, EPFL, ETH Zurich, University of Bern, UC Berkeley, University College London, UIUC, SMU, and the Technion. It's based at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech in NYC.

Background and Objectives

Cryptocurrencies and smart contracts are emerging into a rich spectrum of new financial instruments and business tools, and blending finance with computer science in unprecedented ways. IC3 is collaborating with domain experts in finance and banking, entrepreneurs, regulators, and open source software communities to move these blockchain-based solutions from today’s white boards and proof-of-concepts to tomorrow’s fast and reliable financial systems of execution and record.

Skill Sets and Deliverables

IC3 uniquely meets the blockchain community's urgent need for world-class expertise in computer science that spans cryptography, distributed systems, programming languages, game theory, and system security techniques. IC3 applies this depth of expertise to deliver value on the two nested levels of science and code:

Funding

We invite partners in industry, law and commerce to sponsor and collaborate with us in our mission to deliver powerful, principled, and practical innovations. Please see our Partners page for how to get involved.

Outcomes

Expected outcomes of our work include new cryptocurrency and smart contract solutions that are easy to program and formally verifiable, with provable security properties that meet industry’s expectations for efficiency and reliability. These include financially enforceable cryptographic protocols whose security properties are backed by enforceable payments in case of a breach, as well as high-assurance, high performance systems for storing and handling high-value cryptocurrencies and confidential transactions. Please see our Projects page for more info. All IC3 projects funded by our industry partners are open source.

Governance

IC3 distributes funds internally primarily according to a competitive grant process, conducted twice yearly. We have committed to the following priorities: fostering collaboration between IC3 researchers and partners, technology transfer for IC3 research, career support for junior faculty, promoting participation of scientists and practitioners with a diverse range of backgrounds in the blockchain technology area, and encouraging interdisciplinary and cross-campus collaboration among IC3 faculty. IC3 Co-Directors meet monthly.

IC3 has created for program chairs and other interested colleagues the following statement on conflicts of interest for publication submissions: Policy page.

Contact

For inquiries, please email Bria Han, IC3 Community Manager at jh2584@cornell.edu.

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IC3 Bitcoin address: 1C3rocKSh6sPPibn2jbMFBzcdvfGZySY6t