From the Lecture Hall
to the Real World

IC3 bridges the gap between academic rigor and practical application. We drive the research, hackathons, and global events shaping the frontier of blockchain and AI.

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About Us

We are a consortium of academic researchers across 13 universities focused on foundational research in blockchain systems. Our goal is to take concepts from the whiteboard and apply them in the real world.

With expertise spanning applied cryptography, consensus protocols, distributed systems, programming language theory, and game-theoretic mechanism design, our research has played an ongoing, pivotal role in shaping the blockchain industry as we know it.

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Featured Research

IC3 publishes research on blockchain, cryptology, decentralized systems, AI and more.

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DAO Decentralization: Voting-Bloc Entroy, Bribery and Dark DAOs

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) use smart contracts to foster communities working toward common goals. Existing definitions of decentralization, however-the ‘D’ in DAO-fall short of capturing key properties characteristic of diverse and equitable participation…

Prooφ: A ZKP Market Mechanism

Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) are computationally demanding to generate. Their importance for applications like ZK-Rollups has prompted some to outsource ZKP generation to a market of specialized provers. However, existing market designs either do not fit the ZKP setting or lack formal description and analysis…

Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable

The Bitcoin cryptocurrency records its transactions in a public log called the blockchain. Its security rests critically on the distributed protocol that maintains the blockchain, run by participants called miners. Conventional wisdom asserts that the protocol is incentive-compatible and secure against…