Blockchain Technologies: from an art to a science

Bitcoin and blockchain techniques significantly reshape the future of financial transactions, and distributed interactions in general, and eventually bring us a much more organized and documented digital world. The design of Bitcoin system is very elegant; it utilizes light weight cryptographic tools in a smart way so that the resulting system is open, secure, and also efficient. Today, Bitcoin and blockchain techniques have gained lots of attention, and huge amount of creative ideas have been introduced by researchers, developers, and advocates in Bitcoin community.

We take the provable security approach to developing blockchain techniques. We hope we can eventually move these powerful blockchain techniques from an art to a science. Specifically, we are interested in the following research topics:

• Developing new security analysis frameworks.
• Designing new blockchain consensus protocols.
• Designing new applications on top of blockchains.

Research and teaching activities:

• Summer school on Blockchain Technologies, Beijing, Aug 14-18, 2017
• tutorial on Cryptographic Foundations of Blockchains
  
• Winter school on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technologies, Shanghai, Jan 15-17, 2017
• tutorial on Alternative Consensus
• Richmond Bitcoin and Blockchain meetup. Some previous talks
  
• Ethereum blockchain and its challenges
• Multi-mode cryptocurrency systems
• How to mimic Nakamoto's design via proof-of-stake
  
• 32 bytes to get full-node security
• Digital liquid democracy and more (via blockchain)
• TumbleBit: An untrusted Bitcoin-compatible anonymous payment hub
• Teaching: Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Techniques (Spring 2017,2018,2019, CMSC 691/615)
• student presentations
• Recent and upcoming invited/keynote talks
• talk at Nanyang Technological University, August 2019
• Secure Computation and Blockchain
• tutorial at Blockchain Summer School at City University, Hong Kong, August 2019
• Alternative consensus: Proof of Stake and Scalability
  
• keynote talk at SCC 2019 -- the 7th international workshop on Security in Cloud Computing, July 2019
  
• Fractal: A new paradigm for high-performance proof-of-stake blockchain
  
• talk at DLoT 2019, June 2019
  
• How to mimic Nakamoto's design via proof of stake
• talk at Dartmouth College, the Institute for Security, Technology, and Society, May 2019
  
• Fractal: A new paradigm for high-performance proof-of-stake blockchain
• talk at Virginia Logistics Center, Intermodel Mobility of Goods & Services, April 2019
• Enabling secure logistics via blockchain and cryptography
  
• talk at Computer Science Seminar Series, Northern Virginia Center, Virginia Tech, April 2019
•  Exploring New Frontiers in Blockchain: Proof-of-Stake, Scalability, and More
  
• talk at Stanford Blockchain Conference, Feb 2019
• How to mimic Nakamoto's design via proof of stake
  
• keynote talk at VCU Engineering Alumni College, March 2018
• Blockchain design: From proof-of-work, to proof-of-stake, and beyond
  
• talk at AFRL Annual Symposium on Blockchain and Internet of Things, 2018
  
• Blockchain design: Security-efficiency tradeoffs and their applications

Implementation projects:

• Trim (Blockchain pruning)
  
• TwinsCoin (PoW/PoS hybrid blockchain)
  

Research papers: