Student organization
Blockchain Group@ Northwestern
We study cryptography, distributed consensus, market design, and on-chain data
- WhereWeekly in Evanston
- WhoUndergraduate and graduate
- PrerequisitesNone
Programs
What the group runs
Weekly meeting
A seminar on how blockchains work, covering consensus, cryptographic primitives, and the economics layered on them
Meeting scheduleBuild sessions
Reading contracts, querying on-chain data, deploying to a testnet, and working through contract vulnerabilities
Workshop tracksResearch
A biweekly reading group and small project teams, chaired by a graduate student
Focus areas and projectsSpeakers
Engineers, researchers, and investors from the ecosystem, giving technical talks with a long Q&A
Upcoming eventsResearch
A reading group and small project teams
Chaired by a graduate student, across five areas listed with the open questions in each
Consensus & scalability
How mutually distrusting machines agree on an ordering, and what faster agreement costs
Applied cryptography & zero knowledge
Proof systems and the primitives that let a verifier check a computation it did not run
Market & mechanism design
Fee markets, automated market makers, and auctions as design problems
On-chain measurement
Transaction-level data from public ledgers, and what it can and cannot settle
Policy & regulation
Where technical design and the regulatory environment constrain each other
Get involved
Meetings are open to all students
No application, no dues, and no prior background, with announcements and weekly topics going out in the Discord
Questions, speaking, and sponsorship go to blockchaingroup@u.northwestern.edu