IC3 Blockchain Camp 2024

June 10-16, 2024 Cornell Tech (Roosevelt Island) New York, NY

Thank you to everyone who participated in the 2024 IC3 Blockchain Camp!

We were back at Cornell Tech's campus on Roosevelt Island for a week of learning, networking, and hacking.

CAMP HIGHLIGHTS

This year’s Camp included research talks about TradFi, regulation, cryptography, infrastructure, scalability, L2s, DAOs, and more. Not to mention our seven-day hackathon.

Opening address given by IC3 Associate Director Prof. Andrew Miller (UIUC), who acknowledged the initiative's contributions, naming several well-known projects and companies that originated from IC3.

See the full agenda below.

The Talks

• Ben Livshits, VP of Research at Matter Labs, discussed long-term ZK innovations. He pointed out that ZK "is not just math", but rather implementation, and addressing bugs and challenges.
• Alice Han from Greenmantle & London School of Economics spoke about how Chinese regulators view crypto post-2021 crackdown.
• Prof. James Grimmelmann (Cornell, IC3) discussed what classifies as blockchain property. He explored a taxonomy of how the legal system could treat blockchains. Here’s a link to his presentation.
• Michael Neuder, researcher at Ethereum Foundation, broke down the concepts of staking, restaking, and liquid staking in his presentation. Check out his research that inspired his talk.
• Jeremy Pollack from Onyx by J.P. Morgan spoke about what attracted one of the world's largest banks to crypto: "The fact that crypto is 24/7, allows for cross-border money transfers, and programmability through the use of smart contracts."
• IC3 PhD student Kushal Babel introduced his research "PROF: Fair Transaction-Ordering in a Profit-Seeking World" — a strategy to fairly sequence transactions utilizing Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), which helps mitigate the negative effects of MEV.
• Emin Gün Sirer, founder of AvaLabs and former IC3 Co-Director, shared his journey building the pioneering Avalanche protocol, the challenges of transitioning from academia to industry, and new developments his team is working on which involves GenAI.

• Prof. Dahlia Malkhi (UCSB) explained the need for Byzantine View Synchronization, why it was previously overlooked before linear view-change (Hotstuff), and how to solve it with amortized linear communication and optimal leniency.

• Steven Goldfeder (CEO at Offchain Labs & IC3 alumni) and Harry Kalodner (CTO at Offchain Labs) shared stories from the early days of building Arbitrum. Fast-forward to today, Arbitrum is the leading L2 with nearly $18B in TVL.

• 21Shares, Grayscale Investments, and Fidelity Digital Assets discussed investor appetite post-FTX and the explosion of interest from retail in relation to spot ETFs.

In addition to talks and panels, IC3 students presented their recent research on diverse topics like zkBridge, decentralized AI, and smart contract security.

The Hackathon

Teams were assembled on the first day of the Camp after reviewing the project proposals. Everyone researched and programmed throughout the week and presented their projects on the last day of the Camp. Projects were judged by Sarah Allen (IC3, Flashbots), Patrick McCorry (Arbitrum Foundation), Surya Bakshi (Offchain Labs), Haaroon Yousaf (IC3), Lorenz Breidenbach (Chainlink Labs). The judges based their decisions on novelty, practicality, user experience, technical difficulty, and maturity of development within the week.

Winning Projects:

1. First Place - Boquila

Team Members: Giannis Kaklamanis (Yale University), Vivian Jeng (Ethereum Foundation), Jayamine Alupotha (IC3, University of Bern), Mariarosaria Barbaraci (IC3, University of Bern), Abhimanyu Rawat (UPF Barcelona)

Summary: The team explored protecting user identities from third parties through the use of multiple public keys that validate users. This prevents social media accounts and other websites from tracking online behavior. For more details, read our new IC3 blog post.

2. Second Place - DAO Decentralization

Team Members: Daniel Vilardell (IC3, Cornell Tech), Amy Zhao (IC3), Shashank Motepalli (University of Toronto), Tanusree Sharma (UIUC), Siheng Pan (UIUC)

Summary: This project applies the Voting-Bloc Entropy metric from the paper "DAO Decentralization: Voting-Bloc Entropy, Bribery, and Dark DAOs" to real DAO voting data for 27 DAOs. It visualizes changes over time, voter participation, distribution of voting power, voting clusters, and proposal metadata.

3. Third Place - TEE - IPFS

Team Members: Marwa Moallem (IC3, Technion), James Austgen (IC3, Cornell Tech), Andrew Miller (IC3, UIUC), Pradyumna Shome (Georgia Tech), Jiasun Li (George Mason University)

Summary: The team created an HTTPS domain name that can only be served by a gateway verifying the hashes of IPFS files using remote attestation and a trusted execution environment. This ensures users can access IPFS files through their web browsers with confidence in their accuracy.

Group Activity & Closing Party

Camp attendees also enjoyed a group activity —the MET tour— to experience the rich museum culture NYC has to offer.

The camp concluded with an epic closing party sponsored by Chainlink, held at the historical Sanctuary on Roosevelt Island with live jazz music, delicious food, and a reward ceremony for our hackathon winning teams.

A special shoutout to our technical committee for putting on such a stellar event: Sarah Allen, Surya Bakshi, Lorenz Breidenbach, Patrick McCorry, and Haaroon Yousaf. We also thank IC3 partners and sponsors for their generous support:

Thank you again to everyone who participated in this year’s event! We hope to see you again next year!

Important Note

Last but not the least, registration for the Science of Blockchain Conference 2024 (SBC'24) will close this Friday, June 28! Join us at Columbia University from Aug 7-9 for this year's conference, hosted by IC3 and co-organized by Stanford CBR and Berkeley RDI. Register here today!