New Round of Sui Academic Research Awards Announced: Participation from World-renowned Universities, 17 Projects Funded Over $420,000

The Sui Foundation recently announced the winners of the new round of Sui Academic Research Awards. This program aims to fund research that promotes the development of Web3, particularly advancing the technological frontiers related to blockchain networks, smart contract programming, and products built on Sui.

In the past two phases, the Sui Foundation approved 17 proposals from several internationally renowned universities, with a total funding amount of $425,000. The participating universities include Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), University College London (UCL), École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), and National University of Singapore (NUS), among others.

Overview of Winning Proposals

DAOs: Diversity of Voting Groups

The research led by Professor Ari Juels at Cornell University aims to address the fundamental issues of decentralized organizations. The project will establish metrics to measure the degree of decentralization of DAOs and explore practical methods to enhance decentralization within organizations.

Adaptive Secure Asynchronous DAG Protocol Consensus

Philipp Jovanovic from University College London proposed the development of an asynchronous DAG protocol to enhance attack resistance and adapt to changing adversaries. The protocol aims to provide better security and adaptability while maintaining performance levels close to those of partially synchronous adversaries.

Sui smart contract auditing under the guidance of large language models

The Arthur Gervais team at University College London plans to improve Move smart contract auditing using large language models such as GPT-4-32k and Claude-v2-100k. The project will extend to Sui smart contracts, emphasizing the timely execution of robust security assessment engineering.

Mapping Consensus Protocol Field

Professor Christopher Cachin from the University of Bern will investigate the current consensus domain, providing new insights into cryptographic consensus protocols, which will help better understand existing algorithms and offer new structures for designing distributed protocols.

High-Trust Verification Framework for Decentralized Oracle Protocol

Giselle Reis from Carnegie Mellon University and Bruno Woltzenlogel Paleo from Djed Alliance will create a framework to rigorously analyze and verify blockchain oracles through formal methods, ensuring the accuracy and fairness of external data in smart contracts.

Identify scalability bottlenecks

Professor Roger Wattenhofer from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich will study the identification of bottlenecks originating from design flaws in smart contracts, aiming to enhance the parallelization potential of blockchain applications, and exploring the impact of transaction fee adjustments on parallelization.

Bullshark Protocol Mechanization

Professor Ilya Sergey from the National University of Singapore will use modern computer-aided verification tools to formally verify the properties of Bullshark, advancing the understanding of DAG-based consensus protocols.

BBSF: Blockchain Benchmarking Standard Framework

Professor Henry F. Korth from Lehigh University proposed the creation of a standardized benchmark format for blockchain to fairly compare L1 blockchains and L2 scaling solutions, providing users and developers with transparent insights into chain performance.

Build a scalable and decentralized shared sequencing layer

Professor Min Suk Kang from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology will explore using Bullshark/Mysticeti as a shared sorting algorithm, involving the operation of multiple Rollups that use Sui as the sorting layer.

Local fee market for optimal congestion pricing

Professor Abdoulaye Ndiaye from New York University will study the local fee market to optimize congestion pricing and establish an effective pricing mechanism that reflects congestion status for optimal resource allocation.

SAMM: Sharded Automated Market Maker

Professor Ittay Eyal from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology is developing the concept of sharded contracts to increase concurrency using multiple contracts. The project aims to adjust the incentives for liquidity providers and traders to maintain multiple AMM shards.

Private Disclosure in Competitive Mechanisms

Professor Andrea Attar from the University of Roma Tor Vergata will explore new approaches to market mechanism design, studying the impact of designers privately disclosing information to agents on market outcomes and strategic interactions.

Use large language models to generate Sui smart contracts

Ken Koedinger and Eason Chen from Carnegie Mellon University will study how to fine-tune large language models using Move code and Sui-specific prompts to improve the generation of Sui smart contracts.

COMET: Transitioning to Move's comparative metrics and framework

Professor George Giaglis from the University of Nicosia will conduct a comprehensive comparative analysis between Solidity and Move, facilitating a deeper understanding of the functions and capabilities of Move.

Revolutionary DeFi: Deep Learning Method to Optimize Liquidity and Dynamic Fees on Sui

Rachid Guerraoui and Walid Sofiane from EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) will develop a hybrid deep learning model for optimal range prediction in the Sui DeFi protocol, aimed at improving the responsiveness of DeFi protocols to market changes.

Assessing the predictive capability of SUI volatility

Professor Stavros Degiannakis of the Open University of Cyprus will investigate the effectiveness of the SPEC algorithm in predicting the volatility of Sui assets, with a focus on SUI assets.

low-memory post-quantum transparent zkSNARKs

Brett Falk and Pratyush Mishra from the University of Pennsylvania will focus on developing scalable zkSNARKs to address key obstacles such as prover time complexity, space complexity, and SRS size.

These research projects cover multiple key areas of blockchain technology, from consensus algorithms to smart contract security, and from DeFi optimization to privacy protection. By supporting these cutting-edge research initiatives, the Sui Foundation aims to promote technological advancement and innovation across the entire blockchain industry.