The Science of Blockchain Conference (SBC 2023) is held annually at Stanford University. The local ZKM team attended, and of the attending team Chief Research Advisor Jeroen van der Graaf shares his experience and gives his insight of the events and the seminars with commentary:
his year’s version of the Science of Blockchain Conference, SBC’23, was held from August 28th till 30th, at Stanford University. It was the seventh version of this conference, but for me it was the first time.
The mission of this conference is described as follows:
The conference focuses on technical innovations in the blockchain ecosystem, and brings together researchers and practitioners working in the space. We are interested in the application of cryptography, decentralized protocols, formal methods, and empirical analysis, to improving the security and scalability of blockchain deployments. We aim to foster collaboration among practitioners and researchers working on blockchain protocol development, cryptography, distributed systems, secure computing, crypto-economics, and economic risk analysis.
As a researcher in the blockchain space, I loved this conference. Many many interesting talks, sometimes overwhelmingly so. I say that because the scope of scientific disciplines is enormous, and it is impossible to be an expert in all. To give an example, one can be an expert in algorithmic game theory or in formal methods for smart contract verification, but not in both. I cannot think of a better conference which covers all the scientific aspects of the blockchain ecosystem. “Undeniably the best conference on research on blockchain” in the words of Ben-Sasson.
And many people agree, because the conference has become hugely popular. Besides scientists, there were many people pitching their ideas, and many investors looking for business opportunities, giving the conference a lively atmosphere not usually seen at purely scientific events. There was even a 45 minutes of lightning talks, in which anybody who wanted could talk for two minutes.
Also some additional workshops were organized on the days before and after the conference. I chose to go to a workshop focused on consensus, which is the generic term for mechanisms that allow a distributed network to come to an agreement about the state, such as proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, Byzantine agreement, voting protocols for selecting a leader, etcetera. And I visited the workshop organized by Starkware.
The following is a selection of the presentations that drew my attention. It is somewhat arbitrary and biased towards cryptography (what did you expect? (:-) Feel free to check the program out yourself. And almost everything has been recorded and is available on youtube:
Monday August 28
Tuesday August 29
Wednesday August 30
Each of these lectures presented a long-term perspective of the respective area.
Both papers present exciting new results on making zk proofs even more efficient using folding schemes. In the first talk I learned about Customizable Constraint System: generalizations of R1CS, Plonkish and AIR.
This article’s author, Jeroen van der Graaf, is Senior Research Advisor for ZKM.
ZKM is an open-source infrastructure project, building ZK-enabled Hybrid Rollup technology to enable instant transactions with maximum security. Using our tech, any Layer 1 blockchain will be able to connect to the Ethereum ecosystem in a fundamental and truly secure way, and any existing Layer 2 Rollup will solve its biggest and most daunting challenges. Our goal is to turn Ethereum into the Global Settlement Layer. Welcome to the Web3 Revolution.
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