CMU hosts researchers and industry experts for the Second Annual Secure Blockchain Summit

Despite advances, many research questions still need to be answered to ensure blockchain protocols and applications are ready for widespread use. As the industry continues to see more consumer applications, such as decentralized finance (DeFi), securing the fundamental research elements of the technology, especially from a security, privacy, ethics, and societal impact perspective, is of utmost importance.

To address these research challenges, Carnegie Mellon University’s Secure Blockchain Initiative (SBI) brought together the foremost blockchain researchers and industry experts for the Second Annual Secure Blockchain Summit.

“Blockchain is an incredibly interdisciplinary area,” said Elaine Shi, co-director of the SBI, during her opening remarks at the summit. ““Our cross-campus initiative spans multiple colleges across the university, and today’s programming will reflect that.”

Held April 16-17 on the Carnegie Mellon campus, the two-day event featured six sessions and more than 30 speakers and panelists across industry and academia who presented groundbreaking research and best practices on topics such as cryptoeconomics, applied cryptography, programming languages, policy and regulation, formal methods, and more.

The agenda featured researchers from top universities, including Princeton, Stanford, and Duke, with areas of expertise ranging from computer science and economics to public policy and human-computer interaction.

The summit also featured presentations by leaders from a diverse range of nonprofit, corporate, and government organizations such as J.P. Morgan, Moody’s Ratings, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

Carole House, executive in residence at Terranet Ventures and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, presented the keynote address on the topic of “Identity, Security, and Accountability: Critical Evolutions Needed for Trustworthy Blockchain Ecosystems.”

 

Matt Weinberg, associate professor at Princeton University, shared a feature presentation in which he revisited the primitives of transaction fee mechanism design. And a number of Carnegie Mellon Ph.D. students shared their most recent web3 research, including Hao Chung, Abhiram Kothapalli, Mingxun Zhou, and Ke Wu, who recently accepted a tenure-track faculty position at the University of Michigan.

In addition to the keynote, featured presentations, and lightning talks, Ariel Zetlin-Jones, co-director of the SBI, moderated a policy panel featuring Peter Van Valkenburgh of the Coin Center, Thomas Ruchti of the Office of Financial Research at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and Chester Spatt of CMU’s Tepper School of Business.

The Secure Blockchain Summit also featured a dinner on day one, a networking reception on day two, and multiple breakout sessions throughout the event to give experts from around the world an opportunity to share their research and discuss the future of distributed ledger technology and its applications.

“One of our goals for this conference was to bring together engineers, computer scientists, and economists who are all working in this space together to learn from each other,” said Zetlin-Jones during his closing remarks at the summit. “I found it inspiring and enlightening, and we want to thank all of the speakers and presenters for participating.”

The Secure Blockchain Summit was made possible thanks to the generous support of this year’s sponsors, the Algorand Foundation, Ripple, Jito Labs, and SoftLedger.

Interested in supporting the Secure Blockchain Initiative? Reach out to Michael Lisanti, Director of Partnerships, at mlisanti@andrew.cmu.edu or 412-268-1870.