July 25-31, 2021
Virtual! Check out our talk recordings on YouTube.
IC3 conducted our sixth immersive weeklong coding and learning experience in Cryptocurrencies, Blockchains, and Smart Contracts with world-leading professors, open source architects, developers, and students. This year we met virtually.
Participants
Prof. Ari Juels, IC3 co-Director, welcomed camp participants on Sunday, and shared some brief history of the camp and its impact on the community (recording here). The Camp Technical Committee led by Patrick McCorry, with Surya Bakshi and Tyler Kell, gave an overview of the schedule and expectations, as well as introduced the folks proposing projects for the week.
There were eight project teams that self-selected projects on Sunday after considereing the project proposals. The teams coded throughout the week, and made project presentations and demos on Saturday.
The top projects (a four-way tie) were selected by our panel of judges: Hudson Jameson, Mikerah Quintyne-Collins, and Hasu.
Winning Projects (Four-Way Tie)
Evaluate the Security Properties and Performance Costs of Rollups
Members: Patrick McCorry (project leader), Abhimanyu Rawat, Amirreza Sarencheh, Austin Liu, Sarisht Wadhwa, and Chris Buckland.
Summary: Commitchains, and in particular rollups, are a promising scability solution for networks like Etherem. Our team set out to evaluate the security and performance of rollups to better understand why they are secure and how well they can scale the network. We investigated four emerging protocols including Arbitrum, Optimism, ZKSync, and Starknet. In the end, it is clear that rollups can reduce gas costs by at least 10x while retaining security guarantees similar (and close to) Ethereum. All rollups are in their infancy and there is still significant work required by each team to achieve their true vision.
Summary of findings:
Contingent Claim AMMs
Members: Edward Mehrez (project leader), Patrick Kiefer (project leader), Preston Rozwood, Daxi Li, Sylvain Bellemare, Colin Finkbeiner, Robert Leifke, Mehdi Salehi, Dheeraj Chakilam, Zhengxun Wu, and Yang Wang.
Special thanks to Patrick McCorry and Austin Liu.
Summary: Contingent claims are assets that give their owner a claim to a specific state dependent payoff in the future, including options, insurance, and betting markets. Automated market makers (AMMs) are protocols that quote buy and sell prices for a particular asset without having to match buyers and sellers through a limit order book (LOB). Contingent claim AMMs (CCAMMs) are challenging because they require computationally intensive forecasts for risk management models that determine how to hedge insolvency risk. We made progress on implementing computations for a baseline model (Black-Scholes-Merton) in a trustless manner by designing a circuit that connects API calls to an Intel SGX enclave and associates specific source code to an enclave pseudo-address that can be verified by a smart contract on an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible blockchain. We also made progress on implementing a delta hedging circuit on-chain. Ultimately, the delta calculation can be computed trustlessly off-chain and the executed on an Arbitrum rollup with swap contracts. Finally, as part of the project, we wrote a taxonomy of current options AMM protocols and discussed future directions for more general contigent claim AMMs.
References:
BadgerSwapV3 using Ratel - Putting uniswap on MPC
Members: Yunqi Li (project leader), Deepak Maram, Mark Jabbour, Sylvain Bellemare, Japjeet Singh, and Ren Kunpeng.
Summary: We upgraded HoneyBadgerSwap (hbswap) from V2 to V3 to support new features proposed by Uniswap V3 such as concentrated liquidity. Hbswap provides extra confidentiality requirements for automatic market maker by leveraging MPC servers maintaining a specialized sidechain. Hbswap is MEV-resistant and protects trading strategies of individual users being exploited. A live demo is presented. Bckend of the demo contains less than 300 lines of code written in MPC sidechain specialized language - Ratel.
Resources:
Original blogpost about MPC sidechain and Ratel here.
Github repository here.
Document here.
Frontend here.
Slides here.
MEV and Fairness Cage Match: Attack/Defend
Members: Phil Daian (project leader), Mahimna Kelkar (project leader), Krystal Maughan, Gengmo Qi, Kaushik Donthi, Mohammad Nourbakhsh, and Bruno Mazorra.
Additional Projects
Personal Smart Contract
Members: Andrew Miller (project leader), Surya Bakshi, Neo Cho, Justin Gaffney, and Arpit Kumar.
Summary: Our demo of Personal Smart Contracts included:
A new design for a hybrid paper wallet and business card;
An upgradeable contract and use interface designed to be self-hosted and customized using jsfiddle;
An on-chain calendar booking system for scheduling office hours meetings.
Presentation slides available here.
Blockchain Memes
Members: Tyler Kell (project leader), Surya Bakshi, Yanis Berkani, and Sid.
Summary: We collected data from six social networks and used that to produce graphs showing the relationship between number of memes posted and cryptocurrency price. This project is not over and we intend to push this line of research further.
NFTs for Authentic Data Ownership & Study Authorship
Members: Yan Ji (project leader), Sishan Long (project leader), Aahil Awatramani, Yang Wang, Zheng Wang, and Fan Zhang.
Summary: We implemented a prototype platform allowing researchers to collect authentic data from users and tokenizing data ownership and study authorship. In particular, we modified Town Crier code to handle private credentials and implemented a light-weight browser extension and user-end proxy to make the data collection tool user friendly. We also deployed NFT smart contract for recording data ownership and study authorship.
Fledger
Members: Linus Gasser (project leader) and Bolton Bailey.
Summary: During the IC3 hackathon we managed to add a security feature to the Fledger application, as well as implement a simple decentralized chat. Fledger is a decentralized playground based on webrtc communication, so that a web-browser is enough to join the network. Bolton Bailey added a signature verification to the nodes, so when they join the Fledger network they must give a correct signature to avoid impersonatiing other nodes. Linus added a simple chat application where each node can add messages. The decentralized part makes it that the chat messages are not retrieved from a central server, but from the other nodes running in the system. In a future enhancement, Fledger will be incentivizing storage of messages by distributing tokens for stored messages.
Resources:
Web-frontend for the nodes here.
More explanation of the long-term goals can be found here.
Github repository available here.
Camp Schedule
Monday through Friday featured talks open to the public by blockchain leaders from academia, industry, and the open source community. We also had panels and birds-of-a-feather sessions, and open discussions centered around topics like Real World Crypto, ETH 2.0, and MEV solutions.
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Recordings of most sessions from the 2021 Blockchain Camp are available on IC3's YouTube channel in the "IC3 Blockchain Camp 2021" Playlist.
Link to playlist here.