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, cryptography, decentralized systems, AI and more.

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Your Loss is My Gain: Low Stake Attacks on Liquid Staking Pools

Liquid staking creates a new vulnerability in Proof-of-Stake systems by linking validator performance to token prices. Attackers can exploit this by intentionally degrading a staking pool’s performance while shorting its liquid staking token, profiting from the resulting price drop. Using reinforcement learning, the paper shows such attacks are feasible and often profitable, highlighting a gap between consensus and economic security…

Monotone Erasure Codes

This paper introduces monotone erasure codes, a new type of erasure coding designed for systems with flexible trust assumptions rather than simple threshold failure models. Unlike traditional codes like Reed–Solomon, these codes can reflect scenarios where some nodes are more trusted than others using monotone access structures. The authors present methods to construct such codes, including efficient (but not always optimal) linear versions and optimal constructions based on maximum-distance separable codes. They also develop optimal codes for structures commonly used in blockchain systems…

Single-Item Auctions with a Monopolist Intermediary

This paper studies auctions with a revenue-maximizing intermediary controlling access to the seller, showing that this significantly changes outcomes. It finds that seller mechanisms can become less effective (often reducing to simple posted prices), allowing the intermediary to extract much of the value. The results show that seller revenue can drop sharply compared to a direct auction, and that the timing of moves (who acts first) critically affects outcomes, with no single timing structure always better…