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Our mission urges us to consider problems across multiple subject areas, both applied and theoretical. We pursue these problems in the open and share our results in recorded talks and published papers.

Research Groups

ConsensusLab explores cutting-edge scalable permissionless consensus protocols, including three main pillars of sharding, consensus proper, and scalable execution.

CryptoEconLab at PL aspires to become a hub for research on economic incentives, coordination games, and novel marketplaces. We aim to develop capacity to design, validate, deploy, and govern large-scale economic systems.

Cryptonet is a public good cryptography lab providing technological empowerment by creating secure building blocks for Web3 protocols.

Network Goods explores new mechanisms for incentivizing and supporting public goods creation.

Network Research explores new mechanisms for incentivizing and supporting public goods creation in the areas of science and technology.

ProbeLab is on a mission to measure the performance of Web3 network protocols, benchmark protocols against target performance milestones, and propose improvements to their core design principles.

Research Acceleration seeks to enable faster progress through the design and operation of effective and efficient support and funding mechanisms.

Research Areas

In any forum or marketplace where people can interact, the venue itself guides and constrains human interaction. Cryptoeconomics provides practices, tools, and knowledge that allow us to engineer the venue to achieve a goal.

Modern cryptography plays an integral role in every aspect of online and electronic security, including providing evidence you’re speaking to the intended party and hindering spying on the subsequent communication. Cutting-edge cryptography tools will allow the creation of incredibly strong evidence that general information processing has been performed in a privacy-preserving and trustless way.

Distributed systems are, broadly speaking, networked systems whose components are located in different nodes that communicate and coordinate to achieve the system’s purpose. Distributed systems are at the very core of what we do and our interests extend across the entire field.

Metaresearch is the investigation of how scientific innovation occurs. It encompases work in the history, philosophy, and economics of science; the effects of incentive systems in research; the evaluation and validation of scientific data; and the dissemination of scientific knowledge, among other fields.

Computer networks enable information to move across the globe. They are foundational to the world we live in and to the vast majority of our work. Our interests include transport and routing protocols, network security, p2p systems, publish-subscribe protocols, and network monitoring and simulation.

Recent Talks

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2022-07-26
IPFS network measurements and improvement opportunities
Paris P2P Festival / 2022.04.29 / Paris, France

Recent Publications

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2022-10-24 / Journal article
Mir-BFT: Scalable and robust BFT for decentralized networks
This paper presents Mir-BFT, a robust Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) total order broadcast protocol aimed at maximizing throughput on wide-area networks (WANs), targeting deployments in decentralized networks, such as permissioned and Proof-of-Stake permissionless blockchain systems.
Journal of Systems Research / 2022.10.24
Chrysoula Stathakopoulou, David Tudor, Matej Pavlovic , Marko Vukolić
2022-09-28 / Conference paper
Decentralized hole punching
We present a decentralized hole punching mechanism built into the peer-to-peer networking library libp2p. Hole punching is crucial for peer-to-peer networks, enabling each participant to directly communicate to any other participant, despite being separated by firewalls and NATs.
DINPS 2022 / 2022.07.10 / Bologna, Italy
Marten Seemann , Max Inden, Dimitris Vyzovitis
2022-09-09 / Report
Impossibilities in succinct arguments: Black-box extraction and more
The celebrated result by Gentry and Wichs established a theoretical barrier for succinct non-interactive arguments (SNARGs), showing that for (expressive enough) hard-on-average languages we must assume non-falsifiable assumptions. We further investigate those barriers by showing new negative and positive results related to extractability and to the preprocessing model.
Matteo Campanelli , Chaya Ganesh, Hamidreza Khoshakhlagh, Janno Siim
2022-09-08 / Report
Curve trees: Practical and transparent zero-knowledge accumulators
In this work we propose a new accumulator construction and efficient ways to prove knowledge of some element in a set without leaking anything about the element. This problem arises in several applications including privacy-preserving distributed ledgers (e.
Matteo Campanelli , Mathias Hall-Andersen