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blockchain group@ northwestern

Research

Reading group and project teams

The reading group works through one paper per session, and project teams form out of it and run for a quarter or two

No prior research experience is required, and most members start by reading a single paper with the group

Focus areas

Five areas, and the open questions in each

Consensus & scalability

How mutually distrusting machines agree on an ordering, and what faster agreement costs

  • Where do finality guarantees break under realistic network assumptions?
  • Do rollups actually inherit the security of their settlement layer?

Applied cryptography & zero knowledge

Proof systems and the primitives that let a verifier check a computation it did not run

  • What is the real cost profile of proving versus verifying in production?
  • How much of a chain's trust model rests on assumptions users never see?

Market & mechanism design

Fee markets, automated market makers, and auctions as design problems

  • How well do block-space auctions do against the mechanism-design benchmark?
  • Which token incentive schemes survive contact with strategic participants?

On-chain measurement

Transaction-level data from public ledgers, and what it can and cannot settle

  • Can we reproduce a widely cited on-chain statistic from raw data?
  • How concentrated is activity on chains that call themselves decentralized?

Policy & regulation

Where technical design and the regulatory environment constrain each other

  • Which design choices are downstream of regulation rather than engineering?
  • How do disclosure and custody rules map onto systems with no operator?

Projects

Current projects

Projects marked as seeking collaborators have open places
  • Seeking collaboratorsOn-chain measurement

    Reproducing a widely cited on-chain statistic

    Pull the raw data, attempt to reproduce the figure, and publish the method either way, using SQL rather than cryptography

  • In progressApplied cryptography

    Reading group on proof systems, end to end

    A term-long sequence from interactive proofs to the constructions used in deployed rollups

  • Seeking collaboratorsMarket & mechanism design

    Fee mechanisms against the design benchmark

    Model a live fee market as a mechanism and measure the gap against the theoretical benchmark

Getting started

How the track runs

  • The reading group meets biweekly for one paper, one presenter, and open discussion
  • Project teams form out of it, two to four people, running a quarter or two
  • Completed work is published on this page, credited to the people who did it

Who chairs it

Charles Kozel

Research Chair

Graduate advisor

Advises the reading group and the project teams, and is interested in decentralized communication and social media

blockchaingroup@u.northwestern.edu

Research

The reading group has open places

No application, and no prior research experience required

Join the DiscordHow to get involved

Questions, speaking, and sponsorship go to blockchaingroup@u.northwestern.edu