We are thrilled to announce the 39 grantees selected for the recent Academic Grants Round. This grants round invited researchers, think-tanks, Ph.D. students, and all those interested in advancing knowledge around the Ethereum ecosystem to submit academic proposals.
Thank you to all those who submitted proposals, and congratulations to all the grantees. We are pleased with the number of quality applications that we received, which surpassed our initial expectations. Given the extraordinary potential of many project proposals, we have more than doubled the initial budget from 750,000to2 million.
The granted projects vary broadly in scope and geographic representation with research teams from Australia, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Nepal, Pakistan, Romania, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom the United States and Vietnam.
We look forward to the results from the many academic projects supported in this round! If you missed this round and are researching something in this space, consider submitting a project inquiry to the Ecosystem Support Program.
More than $2 million has been allocated across 39 grants in 7 different categories:
Category
# of projects
amount (USD)
Economics
9
$222,067.00
Consensus Layer
9
$483,477.81
P2P Networking
5
$386,592.00
Maximum Extractable Value
5
$351,659.00
Formal Verification
4
$283,165.51
Cryptography and zero knowledge proofs
2
$120,000.00
Other domains
5
$194,807.00
Economics
Project
Research Team
Institution
Description
Analysis of the Dynamic Interplay between Ethereum and Ethereum Rollups: Transaction Fees and Demand Trends
To research and propose economic modeling of “opportunity costs of capital”, the dynamics of how capital flows between staking opportunities, and what that implies for the security of Ethereum (and other POS blockchains) as it transitions to POS and the optimal design of the staking incentive mechanisms.
Monetary Policy in the Age of Cryptocurrencies
Prof. Thai Nguyen; Prof. Tra Pham; Dr. Binh Nguyen Thanh; Dr. Linh Nguyen Thi My; Dr. Tuan Chu; Dr. Seng Kok; Dr. Phong Nguyen
RMIT Vietnam
To shed light on the possible economic development of countries when cryptocurrencies are used as legal tender, particularly in light of the fact that the central banks would lose most of the monetary policy tools.
Time series analysis for transaction fee market
Huisu Jang YunYoung Lee, Ph.D; Seongwan Park, Ph.D; Seungju Lee Woojin Jeong; Advisor: Jaewook Lee
Soongsil University and Seoul National University
To perform a time series analysis of the Ethereum gas fee market after the introduction of EIP-1559.
The Influence of Transaction Costs on Economic Activity on the Ethereum Network
To understand the market for the music content non-fungible tokens (music NFTs) and the determinants of price, volume, and risk dynamics of such NFTs traded on OpenSea, powered by the Ethereum blockchain.
To understand the economic conditions that justify the emergence of a DAO structure in governing community decisions.
Towards scalable incentive machines: attributing value to individual agents in multi-player games
Tal Kachman
Donders Institute of Brain and Cognition
To bridge coalitional game theory with the approximation power of deep learning to construct payoff machines: large-scale estimators capable of measuring every agent's contribution to a multi-agent system according to different underlying principles.
Understanding Waiting Time in Transaction Fee Mechanisms
Statistical Learning & Computational Finance Lab, Seoul National University
To explore two potential risks of centralizing block production in PBS and propose proper modifications to the current PBS scheme to ensure safety against the suggested risks.
Amplification Messaging for Short-Term Slot Finality and Improved Reorg-Tolerance
Hammurabi Mendes, Ph.D.; Jonad Pulaj, Ph.D.
Davidson College
To formalize and evaluate relatively unobtrusive changes in GASPER for shorter-term finality and decreased likelihood of reorgs.
Analyzing and Securing Ethereum PoS in the Fully Asynchronous Network
To study the security of Ethereum PoS in the fully asynchronous network, in which there is no guaranteed delivery time, and to make design suggestions on how to make Ethereum PoS more secure in an asynchronous network.
Combining Accountability and Game Theory to Strengthen Blockchain Security
To design novel algorithms that we will implement and evaluate in a large-scale distributed environment to demonstrate that blockchains can be made more secure with a practical combination of accountability and game theory.
Disentangling Transaction Privacy and Consensus in Ethereum
To study the dilemma between desirable properties such as (pre and failed trade) transaction privacy and the properties of the underlying consensus mechanism provided by Ethereum.
Improving Ethereum Communication Efficiency through Accountability and Flexible Quorums
Prof. Kartik Nayak
Duke University
To analyze 2 possible avenues to still obtain the same desirable security guarantees while improving efficiency. Firstly, using smaller quorums with accountability to obtain a more communication efficient protocol; and secondly using flexible quorums to obtain stronger security guarantees (of up to ⅔ fraction rational corrupt validators).
To provide an abstract Agent Based Model to simulate Ethereum Proof-Of-Stake consensus.
REVOKE: Consensus-layer mitigations for validator ransomware attacks
Dr. Dan O'Keeffe; Dr. Darren Hurley-Smith; Alpesh Bhudia, Ph.D. candidate
Royal Holloway University of London
To explore consensus protocol adaptations to mitigate the risks of ransomware attacks on Ethereum 2.0 validators. It will aim to design a new revocation mechanism that will allow validators to improve their operational security by quickly changing their signing key without having to withdraw their stake.
To investigate the impact of the Ethereum 2.0 upgrades, mainly including its policy upgrade and the switch from proof of work to proof of stake, on its overall security, degree of decentralization, and scalability.
P2P Networking
Project
Research Team
Institution
Description
Coded Transaction Broadcasting for High-throughput Blockchains
To design and build a new scheme for broadcasting new pending transactions in a blockchain network, with the goal to reduce the bandwidth usage and the latency to propagate transactions.
DoS-secure transaction propagation on Ethereum: Exploit generation and attack detection
To research and build an automated exploit generator to systematically evaluate the security/insecurity of current and future Ethereum clients under the low-cost DoS attacks as well as build DoS-secure mempool and transaction propagation protocols. Particularly, we will present a two-buffer mempool mechanism to support different transaction admission priorities.
Eclipse and DoS-Resilient Overlays for High-Performance Block Dissemination
Prof. Spyros Voulgaris; Evangelos Kolyvas, Ph.D.; Alexandros Antonov, Ph.D.
Athens University of Economics and Business
To design, implement, and evaluate a fully decentralized, self-organizing, self-healing, resource conservative, and dependable dissemination mechanism that delivers messages faster than is currently planned to be employed, while guaranteeing high reliability even in the case of failures or high node churn; and to shield our proposed protocol from Eclipse and DoS attacks, such that it becomes too hard for an attacker to obstruct message dissemination.
Privacy-enhanced and efficient P2P routing algorithms for the Ethereum network
István András Seres, Ph.D. student; Domokos Kelen, Ph.D. student; Ferenc Béres, Ph.D. student; András A. Benczúr, Ph.D
Independent
To design, implement and evaluate a privacy-enhanced routing algorithm for the Ethereum network that provably outperforms state-of-the-art proposals.
Tikuna: an Ethereum blockchain network security monitoring system
To examine how MEV and private transactions change blockchain economics, and impact socially desirable arbitrage such as loan liquidations and the alignment of DEX prices.
Catching the ephemeral: Understanding blockchains through mempool data
To empirically study critical aspects of the Ethereum blockchain such as the fee markets and ordering fairness, by using mempool data.
M2EV: Multi-block MEV games
Bruno Mazorra, Ph.D. student; Prof. Vanesa Daza
Pompeu Fabra University
To formalize the Reorg MEV game through a game theoretical perspective and understand the negative externalities induced by rational validators.
Mechanism Design and Empirical Analysis of MEV Prevention Mechanisms
Prof. Agostino Capponi
Columbia University
To study the design of Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) prevention mechanisms, such as relay and sequencing service, develop an econometric analysis of MEV prevention mechanisms, and quantify their impact on gas fees and value of ecosystem participants.
MEV protection through delayed execution with time-locked puzzles
Mohammad Jahanara
DeFi Lab at University of British Columbia
To explore the design in theory and practice; (a) detailed theoretical evaluation of the design and security proofs in reasonable treat models. The output will be an academic paper or detailed technical report.
Optimal Design of Miner Extractable Value Auctions
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University)
To investigate the optimal design of auctions that, first, allocate the block space to potential transactions, and second, provide an efficient transaction ordering in a Miner Extractable Value Auction (MEVA).
Formal Verification
Project
Research Team
Institution
Description
Bounded Model Checking for Verifying and Testing Ethereum Consensus Specifications
To develop a fully automated and formally verified tool, in Coq, that is able to verify the semantic equivalence of two loop-free fragments of EVM code.
Trustworthy Formal Verification for Ethereum Smart Contracts via Machine-Checkable Proof Certificates
To study how it is possible to adopt, and adapt, authenticated query protocols for blockchains to allow for cross chain communication between different Ethereum side chains (and the main net).
Feasibility Study of Pipelining in Ethereum Virtual Machine Architecture
To research the ways in which networks subsidiary to a given primary blockchain network share features with subsidiary political units in national constitutional orders.
S-CCSC: Security of Cross-chain Smart Contract
Prof. Yang Xiang; Dr. Ziyuan Wang; Dr. Lin Yang; Dr. Sheng Wen; Dr. Donghai Liu
Swinburne University of Technology
To safeguard cross-chain smart contracts by investigating existing or potential security risks and corresponding solutions of cross-chain smart contracts.
We're excited to follow these research teams and see the broad impact they have in expanding academic knowledge throughout the Ethereum ecosystem!
The diversity and quality of this round of grants reflects the interest of Academia in catalyzing our shared knowledge in helping solve major problems and advancing the Ethereum ecosystem.
