With a $5.75 million grant, Yale leads the interdisciplinary blockchain center

With a grant from the Algorand Foundation, Yale researchers are leading an interdisciplinary team of experts working to advance blockchain systems, while exploring their connections to economics and law.

The 5-year, $5.75 million grant will fund PAVE: A Center for Privacy, Accountability, Verification and Economics of Blockchain Systems. The center will be led by Charalampos Papamanthou, associate professor of computer science at Yale University.

The center includes computer scientists from Yale, Columbia University, the City College of New York (CCNY), and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL); legal and financial experts from Yale; and a professor of behavioral economics from Columbia. CertiK, a company focused on blockchain security, co-founded by Zhong Shao Thomas L. Kempner Professor of Computer Science and Head of Department, and Ronghui Gu, professor of computer science at Columbia University, will also participate in the center.

“I am thrilled to begin working with my talented colleagues from Yale, Columbia, CCNY, EPFL and CertiK to advance the goals of PAVE, Yale’s Algorand Center of Excellence,” Papamanthou said. “PAVE’s hallmark is advancing the foundations of blockchain systems using cryptography, distributed systems, and formal verification, while exploring concrete connections between these foundations to economics and law. We are grateful to the Algorand Foundation for providing support for a 5-year research- , education and outreach program, and look forward to working with them.”

The team is one of 10 to be named Algorand Centers of Excellence, each of which aims to build and operate interdisciplinary centers with the goal of advancing research and supporting applied education about blockchain and cryptocurrency. The Algorand Foundation, which promotes blockchain technology and cryptocurrency, announced the winners today.

“The establishment of PAVE furthers our goal of building on our strength in cybersecurity through broad collaborations. It positions Yale’s CS department as a clear leader in this field,” said SEAS Dean Jeffrey Brock. “The center’s interdisciplinary approach also establishes CS as a valuable partner for researchers across the university.”

The overall goal of the Yale-led project is a multifaceted approach designed to accelerate the deployment and use of blockchain, a decentralized, jointly maintained database designed for the reliable storage of digital information. The members of PAVE will work in five areas, bringing together fields that rarely collaborate in the blockchain space. It is an approach that will address the complex nature of the blockchain. For example, there are legal issues to consider in PAVE’s proposed privacy deployment techniques. Similarly, the centre’s work with evidence systems and consensus technology will involve certain financial aspects. The five areas are:

1. Blockchain design. Blockchains emerged nearly 15 years ago, but PAVE members say research into how they are created has only scratched the surface. Led by experts in blockchain technology and cryptography, PAVE will develop state-of-the-art blockchain designs and protocols that have privacy, fairness and scalability.
2. Formal verification of blockchains. To increase the security of blockchain architectures (including Algorand’s), PAVE researchers with programming language expertise will investigate formal verification (a way to mathematically ensure that a system behaves as intended) of consensus protocols and smart contracts.
3. Interaction between blockchains and economics. Led by PAVE researchers at Columbia Business School, and in collaboration with computer science principal investigators, PAVE will study economic aspects of several fundamental components of blockchain systems.
4. Interaction between blockchains and law. PAVE investigators who have worked in the interaction between informatics and law will lead center participants in a two-part research agenda. They will explore topics such as enforcement of smart contracts, liability of software developers and consensus participants, and the interaction between privacy and regulation.
5. Blockchain education, outreach and wider implications. As part of the project, PAVE researchers will develop new courses in the area of ​​blockchain and cryptocurrency at all levels of education to promote the use of blockchain technology for the benefit of society.

In addition to Papamanthou, the center’s members include, from Yale, Zhong Shao, Joan Feigenbaum and Ben Fisch; from Columbia University, Tal Malkin, Eran Tromer and Gur Huberman; Rosario Gennaro of the City College of New York (CCNY); Bryan Ford of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL); and the formal verification team at CertiK.