Anaxi Labs becomes strategic partner with Carnegie Mellon University for Secure Blockchain Initiative

Anaxi Labs, a scientific organization dedicated to researching and developing cryptographic technology, has partnered with Carnegie Mellon University to support technology creation through the Secure Blockchain Initiative (SBI). SBI is run out of CyLab, the university’s cybersecurity and privacy institute, and is a university-wide interdisciplinary program that seeks to improve blockchain technologies.

“We aim to bring together CMU’s world-class researchers and faculty with world-class engineers  who have experience building and operating household-name products with hundreds of millions of users,” said Kate Shen, co-founder of Anaxi Labs and CMU alumna.

This partnership will foster collaboration between researchers in industry and in academics. CyLab researchers will learn from the insights developed by their counterparts at Anaxi Labs, while Anaxi Labs engineers will apply the Carnegie Mellon researchers’ findings in order to more quickly build solutions to make more secure and scalable Web3 applications.

“Collaborating with partners allows CyLab researchers to work on projects with direct, real-world applications, ensuring that their work has practical relevance and potential for impact”, said Michael Lisanti, CyLab director of partnerships. “Industry partnerships provide opportunities for students and postdoctoral researchers to gain experience working on industry-relevant projects, preparing them for future careers. Companies, in turn, gain access to a pool of highly skilled and innovative talent, potentially leading to future recruitment opportunities.”

In addition to sponsoring the Secure Blockchain Initiative, Anaxi Labs will also fund research by Bryan Parno, Kavčić-Moura Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science. Parno’s lab researches techniques that developers can use to keep their software systems secure and private in order to stop breaches before they happen, rather than as patchwork solutions after-the-fact. Parno and his team develop advanced cryptographic techniques to ensure code executes correctly, as well as mathematical techniques to prove the executed code will have the intended effects.

“Our research aims to advance the state-of-the-art in recursive proofs (a topic of considerable interest in the blockchain space) using tools like reductions of knowledge and folding schemes,” said Parno. “Anaxi Labs is deeply invested in making these ideas practical and applying them to real-world problems, so we look forward to a fruitful collaboration.”

Much of Anaxi Labs’ work with CyLab will center around blockchain technologies. A blockchain is a distributed ledger technology (DLT) that records digital transactions without a central authority. In a blockchain, blocks of data are linked, or chained, together, and each block encodes information about the previous block, which makes them unalterable.

“We at Anaxi Labs are passionate about game-changing infrastructure-level technologies that allow infinitely scalable blockchains such as ZKP, EVM, modularity, recursion and parallelization, as well as next-generation decentralized applications such as privacy-preserving AI and protocols with the vision of an equitable future,” said Shen.

CMU’s SBI is an interdisciplinary research initiative that brings together engineering, computer science, public policy, economics, and security to tackle scalability, cryptocurrencies, cryptography, regulation, and other current challenges in blockchain technologies. It is co-directed by three CMU faculty members: Elaine Shi, professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering; Nicholas Christin, professor and head of the Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D); and Ariel Zetlin-Jones, professor of economics in the Tepper School of Business.

“I'm excited about the partnership on multiple levels,” said Zetlin-Jones. “The partnership is multidimensional, including supporting the CMU Blockchain community through the Secure Blockchain Initiative, and faculty and student targeted research projects through CyLab.”

For more information on Anaxi Labs, please contact Kate Shen, co-founder, at kate@anaxilabs.com. 

To learn more about partnering with CMU's CyLab and the Secure Blockchain Initiative, please contact Michael Lisanti, CyLab director of partnerships, at mlisanti@andrew.cmu.edu or 412-268-1870.