Building the technical foundations of web3

The Ethereum protocol and its applications rely on critical Byzantine-fault-tolerant distributed protocols. This research area focuses on proving the correctness of such protocols. Our work includes writing (with the Ethereum Foundation) an unambiguous formal specification and providing computer-assisted proofs that the specification satisfies a set of desired properties.

A defining characteristic of the Ethereum blockchain is that it is programmable, but implementing complex business logic as code requires a high degree of trust in the code. This research centers on the design and application of machine-assisted logical reasoning techniques to formalize the smart contract specifications and ensure they implement the correct logic.

Contribute to Ethereum’s decentralized R&D with a focus on the Merge, mainnet client development, maintenance and interoperability, sharing and networking research as well as analysis of existing protocol design and the proposal of new EIPs and API designs.

Scaling Ethereum allows to support more applications at a lower cost. We have the target of increasing the practical capacity by several orders of magnitude at a reasonable hardware cost. Our research is currently centered rollups and zk-EVM with fast and auditable provers.

Cryptography is at the heart of blockchain and this research currently centers on zero-knowledge proofs that will enable greater scalability, privacy, core protocol upgrades and light clients. The team develops open source tools for applying advanced cryptography, including a library used for zk-rollups and zk-EVM.

The success of web3 requires seamless communication across chains and rollups. Current implementations and protocols come with different trade-offs and operational risks. This research centers on new primitives, mechanisms and protocols to enable secure, efficient and decentralized crosschain architectures.