National University of Singapore establishes CRYSTAL Centre – an academic blockchain think tank

The National University of Singapore (NUS) School of Computing has established an academic research laboratory and think tank focused on blockchain technology.

Called CRYSTAL Centre, which stands for Cryptocurrency Strategy, Techniques, and Algorithms, the center has been founded by NUS Computing faculty members and will be co-directed by Assistant Professor Prateek Saxena and Associate Professor Keith Carter, who are from the Department of Computer Science and Department of Information Systems and Analytics.

Previous research from the new Centre’s founding team has led to leading companies in the blockchain and crypto space, including high throughput blockchain platform Zilliqa – the original research for Zilliqa was performed in the lab of Asst Prof Saxena and published in a research paper in 2015, on-chain liquidity protocol Kyber Network, enterprise blockchain company Anquan, and the scalability solution for smart contracts called TrueBit.

The initial sponsors of the Centre include: Quantstamp, NEO Global Capital, Zilliqa, X-Order Institute, Tateru, Chainfund Capital and Kyber Network. The lab has also formed strategic partnerships with Dekrypt Capital, Blockchain at Berkeley and Blockchain at NTU.

The new Centre has been established with the objective of providing scientific clarity in shaping technical ideas in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space. The team of experts has been responsible for several academically grounded spin-offs over the last two years in the blockchain ecosystem, the release said.

The Centre will initially comprise between 5 and 10 faculty members and several scholars working in different research sub-areas. It will conduct research on scalable consensus protocols, verification and testing techniques, privacy-preserving computation, safe programming language design, blockchain applications, fundamentals of trading cryptocurrency, analysis of cryptocurrency economics, and highly available peer-to-peer (P2P) network designs.

“We hope to make debates in the community more scientifically-grounded. The goal is improve interaction between those armed with intuition and those with scientific rigour. We also hope to draw attention to unforeseen scientific challenges, both near-term and long-term,” said Asst Prof Saxena.

The Centre aims to foster an open/public technical community of thought leaders and experts in the blockchain space. It will interact with the industry to draw up new research problems and propose solutions to them. It also plans to host a series of structured events to facilitate interaction with the wider community. An annual workshop with three tracks – including technical research, business and entrepreneurship – is under works.