The Swiss Alps are calling!

Thank you to everyone who participated in the Science of Blockchain Conference (SBC) 2024!

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

Thank you to all who joined us for the IC3 Winter Retreat 2024 at the Eurotel Victoria in Les Diablerets, Switzerland!

Thank you to all who joined us for the IC3 Members & Friends Reception at SBC（Science of Blockchain Conference) 2023！Held at the President's Terrace, an iconic rooftop bar in Palo Alto, the event boasted breathtaking views of Stanford, the Santa Cruz Mountains, and a California sunset. This event provided an opportunity for IC3 academic researchers, industry partners and invited guests to mingle and discuss the latest in blockchain research.

This conference focuses on technical innovations in the blockchain ecosystem, and brings together researchers and practioners working in the space. We are interested in the application of cryptography, decentralized protocols, formal methods, and empirical analysis, to improving the security and scalability of blockchain deployments. We aim to foster collaboration among practitioners and researchers working on blockchain protocol development, cryptography, distributed systems, secure computing, crypto-economics, and economic risk analysis.

Thank you to all who joined us for the 8th Annual IC3 Blockchain Camp! This 7-day experience was hosted at the Cornell Tech Campus on Roosevelt Island, New York City, NY for the first time this year. A special thank you is also due to our camp technical committee of Surya Bakshi, Haaroon Yousaf, Lorenz Breidenbach, and Patrick McCorry for preparing another immersive coding and learning experience and to the IC3 Industry Partners!

Cornell Blockchain Conference is returning to the Cornell Tech campus on April 21st. IC3 Co-director Ari Juels, together with distinguished IC3 alumni Emin Gün Sirer (Founder & CEO of Ava Labs) and Steven Goldfeder (Co-Founder & CEO, Offchain Labs) will be sharing valuable insights across academia and industry. We are excited to announce that IC3 is offering special discount to our newsletter subscribers.

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.

Thank you all for joining us for an evening of art and research talks to celebrate the opening of the NFT Art Gallery at Cornell Tech in New York City.

IC3 will host a dinner at SBC 2022 on Tuesday, August 30th in Palo Alto, CA. The event will run from 5:30-9:30 pm with a cocktail hour followed by a catered dinner and selected talks.

This conference focuses on technical innovations in the blockchain ecosystem, and brings together researchers and practioners working in the space. We are interested in the application of cryptography, decentralized protocols, formal methods, and empirical analysis, to improving the security and scalability of blockchain deployments. We aim to foster collaboration among practitioners and researchers working on blockchain protocol development, cryptography, distributed systems, secure computing, crypto-economics, and economic risk analysis.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for the 7th Annual IC3 Blockchain Camp! This 7-day experience was hosted in-person on the Cornell Campus in Ithaca, NY. Our Camp technical committee of Surya Bakshi, Tyler Kell and Patrick McCorry prepared an immersive coding and learning experience with talks, panels, whiteboard sessions, and a week-long hackathon.

Cornell FinTech Club (CFT), the first all-encompassing fintech club for undergraduates at Cornell University, is hosting a blockchain hackathon (NFTs and more) from April 29 to May 1, 2022 sponsored by Ava Labs, Fintech at Cornell, and The Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts (IC3). This hackathon aims to inspire participants to create blockchain innovations by introducing fintech concepts and developing with Avalanche, Ava Labs' smart contracts blockchain platform. Attendees can mentor, judge, or host/speak at a workshop/event and Cornell undergraduate students only can hack in teams for prizes. With workshops, a $6k+ prize pool, multiple challenges, food, swag, social and corporate events, attendees and hackers will experience a fun, innovative weekend. Want to attend or hack at the 2022 Cornell FinTech Club Avalanche Hackathon? Please fill out this interest form.

The attempt to modernize oversight of America's financial markets and the simultaneous rise of bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and the digital dollar are disrupting financial services as we know them. This roundtable will examine the potential for crypto/blockchain networks to transform the financial sector and what that means for consumers and institutions.

The goal of this event is to introduce Protocol Labs Research's newly formed ConsensusLab to its future partners and to establish a workshop-style venue to bottstrap scientific exchange across a wider community of shared interests. We invite contributions from current and prospective collaborators, as well as from all researchers in the field.

Thank you to all of those that attended the 6th annual Blockchain Camp!

Join us for Tyler Kell's presentation of "DeFi State of the Union", this webinar will be on June 1, 2021.

Join us to hear from Ariah Klages-Mundt presenting his work on Stablecoins.

The third annual Cornell High School Programming Contest Warm Up is a computer programming competition for high school girls and underrepresented high school student groups in technology.

2021 has seen unprecedented interest in Bitcoin and related technologies like the Lightning Network. As these technologies see increases in use, volume, and price, we must consider - how secure and private are they really? Join us for our February webinar to learn about two relevant attacks from IC3 researchers at Cornell and UCL.

This event is only open to IC3 faculty, students, partners, and invited guests.

Join IC3 and Chainlink for this virtual meetup on Order-Fairness for Blockchains with speaker Mahimna Kelkar

Join us for a presentation of "Crystals and Mud on the Blockchain" by James Grimmelmann hosted by IC3.

Thank you attendees of the 5th annual Blockchain Camp!

Join us for a presentation of "Connecting Blockchains to the Real World" by Fan Zhang hosted by IC3.

Due to concerns for the health of our community, this event is being postponed. Please check back for updates and rescheduling.

Join us for networking and blockchain research presentations by Dr. Dawn Song from UC Berkeley and IC3, and Dr. Sam Blackshear from Calibra.

IC3 faculty, students, sponsors, and guests gather at IC3 Retreats to discuss the major technical challenges, issues and innovatve solutions to widespread blockchain adoption.

Cryptocurrencies do not scale. In this technical deep-dive, we provide an overview of an alternative scaling approach, off-chain protocols, that lets parties transact locally amongst themselves instead of the global network. Off-chain is remarkable as in the best case it lets parties bypass all network fees and blockchain latency, and in the worst-case, the parent blockchainsafeguards the funds of all honest parties. We'll cover the two leading approaches, channel-based networks (lightning et al) and commit-chains (plasma & rollup et al) alongside the new the always online assumption and how the community is trying to alleviate it. If we, as a community, can pull off the implementation of off-chain protocols, it will hopefully unleash a truly permissionless, global and internet-scale financial system.

Tyler Kell is a Research Engineer at Cornell Tech & the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3) in New York City. In a prior life, before becoming a researcher, he worked as a penetration tester and security consultant.

The first ACM conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT'19) aims to be a premier venue presenting the latest developments in technologies related directly and indirectly to novel financial infrastructure such as cryptocurrencies and their applications, blockchains, and exchanges.

Join IC3 Directors, Ari Juels and Andrew Miller at this two day gathering at MIT. This event is focused on collaboratively building an interdisciplinary field of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology research. Tickets can be purchased here.

Phil Daian is a noted researcher, second year PhD student at Cornell and IC3, and a software engineer with a passion for computer security and applied cryptography. His research interests span several computer science subfields, with a focus in his current work primarily covering cryptocurrencies and smart contracts.

IC3 conducted our Fourth immersive weeklong coding and learning experience in Cryptocurrencies, Blockchains, and Smart Contracts with world-leading professors, open source architects, developers, and students.

Conducted by Cornell Blockchain, this conference will explore four different topics on blockchains. Platforms, blockchain regulation, security tokens, and growth & adaption will be discussed and explored.

IC3 faculty, students and industry members gather twice per year to discuss the major technical challenges and innovative solutions to widespread blockchain adoption.

Conducted jointly by EPFL, ETH Zurich and IC3, the school aims to bring together students (Master- and PhD-level), academic researchers, and security experts from industry with an interest in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. Please check back later for the agenda and additional information.

Noah Johnson, a PhD student in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, advised by Prof. Dawn Song will talk about Oasis, a platform for privacy-preserving smart contracts at scale. This Meetup is hosted by VMware in Palo Alto, and will be LiveStreamed via Zoom.

Ethan Cecchetti, a PhD student in Computer Science at Cornell, co-advised by Prof. Andrew Myers and Prof. Ari Juels, will talk about Proofs of Replication for Reliable DSN's.

IC3 and the Ethereum Foundation Conducted our Third Immersive Weeklong Coding and Learning Experience in Blockchains and Smart Contracts with World-leading Professors, Open Source Architects, Developers and Students.

IC3 faculty, students and industry members gather twice per year to discuss the major technical challenges and innovative solutions to widespread blockchain adoption.

Professor Andrew Myers, will lead this IC3 Working Group session on Correct by Construction (CxC) Smart Contract Programming Languages.

Growth and Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries in IC3 Lead to Revolutionary Academic Fundraising Model.

Prof. Sarah Meiklejohn is co-Program Chair for FC18 and Prof. Ittay Eyal is co-Program Chair for the 5th Workshop on Bitcoin and Blockchain Research.

Professor Andrew Myers, will kick off the new IC3 Working Group on Correct by Construction (CxC) Smart Contract Programming Languages.

Professor Ari Juels, IC3 co-Director, will present the keynote "Beyond Smarts: Toward Correct, Private, Data-Rich Smart Contracts".

Professor Ari Juels, IC3 co-Director, will present "Beyond Smarts: Toward Correct, Private, Data-Rich Smart Contracts".

IC3 faculty including Bryan Ford, Ari Juels, Andrew Miller, and Elaine Shi are on the program committee.

IC3 faculty Prof. Andrew Myers is the Program Chair.

Professor Andrew Miller, IC3 Associate Director will present "I Accidentally Killed it:" yet another million-dollar Smart Contract mishap. Registration is open for IC3 members.

Professor Ari Juels, IC3 co-Director will present "Enter the Hydra: Towards Principled Bug Bounties and Exploit-Resistant Smart Contracts"

Cornell Tech is opening its new campus to the community in a series of public events. The Blockchains Workshop is co-orgainzed by IC3. Registration is open to the public.

IC3 faculty, students and industry members gather twice per year to discuss the major technical challenges and innovative solutions to widespread blockchain adoption.

Professor Emin Gün Sirer, IC3 co-Director will present "Making Crytpocurrencies Scale with Offline Payments". Registration is open for IC3 members.

Professor Ari Juels, IC3 co-Director will present "Solidus: Confidential Distributed Ledger Transactions via PVORM". Registration is open for IC3 members.

Fan Zhang, a PhD student in CS at Cornell, will speak on Town Crier .

IC3 and the Ethereum Foundation conducted our second annual Boot Camp, an immersive coding and learning experience in blockchains and smart contracts with world-leading researchers, open source developers, and students.

Dr. Ittay Eyal, IC3 Associate Director will present “From Cryptocurrencies to FinTech Blockchains”. Registration is open for IC3 members.

Prof. Ari Juels will speak Monday afternoon at the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance technical session. Prof. Emin Gun Sirer and Prof. Andrew Miller will speak Wednesday morning at the Workshop on Academic Partnerships with Industry.

Professor Emin Gün Sirer, IC3 co-Director, will present the keynote "The New New Blockchains and How They Will Transform The World".

Visit www.town-crier.org starting May 15.

Professor Ari Juels, IC3 co-Director, will present "The Jekyll and Hyde of Smart Contracts".

Professor Emin Gün Sirer, IC3 co-Director, will present "What Could Go Wrong? When Blockchains Fail".

IC3 staff and members gather twice per year to discuss the major technical challenges and innovative solutions to widespread blockchain adoption. Our Sponsor Member Chain is hosting this 2-day Retreat at their offices in SF.

Prof. Ari Juels - Panel on "Financial Markets Smart Contracts - Implementing Legally Sound, Predictable and Secure Processes"

Prof. Emin Gun Sirer - Panel on "Impact of Recent Innovation on Trading, Settlement, and Clearance Activities"

Phil Daian joins Vitalik Buterin et al. on Devcon2 panel

Prof. Ari Juels, IC3 co-Director, will describe Town Crier (TC), an authenticated data feed system built using Intel’s new SGX trusted hardware features. TC acts as a trustworthy proxy between existing (HTTPS-enabled) servers and smart contracts without any need for users to trust the system’s operators. Unlike basic oracles, TC also supports private queries, which offer the critical property of confidentiality for data requests, and custom queries, which make secure use of users’ credentials. Applications include insurance contracts that protect consumer privacy, systems to trade online resources such as games for cryptocurrency, and much more.

Professor Andrew Miller, IC3 Associate Director, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign will talk about "Hawk" - the blockchain confidentiality protocol he pioneered, smart contract programming in general, and relevance of the concept of Turing completeness, which is often misinterpreted.

IC3 and the Ethereum Foundation conducted an immersive 9-day coding and learning experience in blockchains and smart contracts with world-leading researchers, open source developers, and students.

Our first IC3 retreat in NYC on May 17, 2016 was a great success, with more than 80 attendees from industry and academia. The slides and video from the retreat are now available at the link above.