January 15-18, 2023
Eurotel Victoria - Les Diablerets, Switzerland
Thank you to all who joined us for the 2023 IC3 Winter Retreat at the Eurotel Victoria in Les Diablerets, Switzerland! Our technical committee of Surya Bakshi, Lorenz Breidenbach, Patrick McCorry, and Haaroon Yousaf prepared another immersive blockchain learning experience.
The retreat agenda consisted of 10-minute talks covering a variety of cutting edge blockchain topics, a panel, a Town Hall session, and social activities with our IC3 colleagues. Our featured technical sessions focused on consensus, enabling DeFi, cryptography, understanding blockchains, MEV and centralization, and identifying gaps in IC3’s research agenda. See the full agenda below.
Event Agenda
| Sunday | |
| 15:00 - 19:00 | Arrival and Check-In |
| 19:00 - onwards | Welcome Reception and Dinner |
| Monday | |
| 08:00 - 08:45 | Breakfast |
| 08:45 - 09:00 | Welcome - Jim Ballingall |
| 09:00 - 10:00 | Session 1: Consensus - Session Chair: Andrew Miller |
| 1. Ujval Misra - Specular: Towards Trust-minimized Blockchain Execution Scalability with EVM-native Fraud Proofs 2. Matan Yechieli - Low-Latency Blockchains with DAG Holography 3. Christian Cachin - Asymmetric Byzantine Consensus 4. Ignacio Amores Sesar - A Security Analysis of Avalanche Consensus 5. Luca Zanolini - Quorum Systems in Permissionless Network | |
| 10:00 - 10:30 | Break - 30 minutes |
| 10:30 - 11:30 | Session 2: Enabling DeFi - Session Chair: Patrick McCorry |
| 1. Ariah Klages-Mundt - Designing Autonomous Markets for Stablecoin Monetary Policy 2. Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias - The Sui Smart Contracts Platform 3. Stephen Buttolph and Patrick O'Grady - Cross-Subnet Messaging 4. Deepak Maram - Designing secure crypto wallets 5. Bryan Ford - Privacy-Preserving Personhood-Based Credentials | |
| 12:00 - 13:30 | Lunch |
| 13:30 - 14:30 | Session 3: Cryptography I - Session Chair: Sarah Meiklejohn |
| 1. James Austgen - Complete Knowledge: How to Destroy a Secret-Sharing Scheme 2. Mahimna Kelkar - Complete Knowledge 3. Amit Agarwal - Concretely efficient two party secure comparison 4. Orestis Alpos - Do Not Trust in Numbers: Practical Distributed Cryptography With General Trust 5. Andrew Miller - TEE blockchains | |
| 14:30 - 15:00 | Break - 30 minutes |
| 15:00 - 16:00 | Panel: MEV and Centralization |
| Moderator: Patrick McCorry Panelists: Barnabé Monnot, Sarah Allen, Mahimna Kelkar, Lorenz Breidenbach | |
| 16:00 - 17:00 | Session 4: MEV - Session Chair: Ittay Eyal |
| 1. Barnabe Monnot - Economic organization of block-building 2. Haoqian Zhang - Flash Freezing Flash Boys(F3B) 3. Jovana Micic - Quick Order Fairness 4. Chris Buckland - Rollup delay attacks 5. Arthur Gervais - Whitehat Hacks? | |
| 17:00 - 19:00 | Networking/Sightseeing |
| 19:00 - onwards | Dinner |
| Tuesday | |
| 08:00 - 08:45 | Breakfast |
| 08:45 - 13:00 | Local Activities |
| 13:00 - 14:00 | Lunch |
| 14:00 - 15:00 | Session 5: Cryptography II - Session Chair: Philipp Jovanovic |
| 1. Mikerah Quintyne-Collins - Knapsack and Knapsack Auctions in MPC 2. Carolina Ortega Perez - Whistleblower Protocols 3. Thomas Yurek - What Went Wrong with Secret Network 4. Jens Groth - Native BTC integration and threshold ECDSA signing service on the Internet Computer 5. Michael Mirkin - Sprints: intermitent mining protocol | |
| 15:00 - 15:30 | Break - 30 minutes |
| 15:30 - 16:20 | Session 6: Understanding Blockchains - Session Chair: Lorenz Breidenbach |
| 1. Zhe Ye - Smart Contract Execution Property Graph 2. Kushal Babel - Lanturn: Measuring Cryptoeconomic Smart-Contract Security through Learning 3. Sarah Meiklejohn - De-Anonymization in Bitcoin 4. Duc V. Le- Modeling Resources in Permissionless Longest-chain Total-order Broadcast 5. Dr. Vero Estrada-Galiñanes - Towards a fair sharing economy in decentralized systems | |
| 16:20 - 16:45 | Break - 25 minutes |
| 16:45 - 17:45 | Town Hall Session - Identifying Gaps in IC3’s Research Agenda |
| Session Chair: Sarah Meiklejohn | |
| 17:45 - 18:00 | Closing Remarks - Jim Ballingall |
| 19:00 - onwards | Chalet Dinner! |
| Wednesday | |
| 08:00 - 08:45 | Breakfast |
| 08:45 - onwards | See You Next Time! |
In addition to our technical sessions, we had the opportunity to appreciate the beautiful scenery surrounding Les Diablerets on a guided snowshoeing excursion.
Our final dinner was a raclette dinner hosted at a historic chalet.
We hope to see you at the next IC3 Winter Retreat!