blue background with a repeating 3d halftone cube pattern

The Columbia-Ethereum Research Center for Blockchain Protocol Design

The Columbia-Ethereum Center for Blockchain Protocol Design brings together the multi-disciplinary expertise at Columbia to advance the performance, security, robustness, and economics of this societally important technology.

Our official website will launch in January 2026.

About

Blockchain technology creates the abstraction of a “computer in the sky”---a global and shared programmable virtual machine that combines the general-purpose functionality of a computer with the decentralization and fault-tolerance of the Internet. A blockchain protocol plays a role similar to that of an operating system---an intermediate layer that insulates the application layer (i.e., smart contracts) from the hardware layer (i.e., the Internet) and acts as the “master program” that coordinates the execution of all the virtual machine’s system and user-installed programs. Blockchain technology can be viewed as adding state and data processing capabilities to traditional Internet infrastructure and, among other applications, it enables stronger forms of ownership of digital assets than society has ever had before.

Blockchain protocol design requires innovation in and the synthesis of a number of technically challenging fields, including distributed systems, game theory and mechanism design, cryptography, and more. 

The Center’s activities include research grants for Columbia faculty, students, and their collaborators; postdoctoral and graduate student fellowships; an industry research-in-residence program; and several events, including the Columbia Cryptoeconomics Workshop and an annual summer school.

Research

The design of blockchain protocols requires the synthesis of multiple disciplines, and accordingly, the center will support research on a wide range of topics, including distributed systems, security and cryptography, and economics and mechanism design.

Example topics of interest include the following:
  • Networking, consensus, and execution for layer-1 blockchain protocols
    • Design and analysis of consensus protocols (traditional goals such as safety, liveness, and efficiency, and blockchain-specific goals such as censorship-resistance or provable slashing guarantees)
    • Quantifying and formalizing the benefits of decentralization
    • Novel attacks on Ethereum and other major blockchain protocols
    • Virtual machine and smart contract programming language design
    • Better and more robust peer-to-peer network protocols for message and transaction dissemination
  • Protocol architecture
    • Designing the block production supply chain
    • Data availability with provable guarantees
    • Design and analysis of light clients
    • SNARK-centric designs for layer-1 protocols
    • Interoperability between different blockchain protocols
    • Improved validity rollups and optimistic-validity hybrid rollup architectures
    • Applications of trusted execution environments (TEEs) to blockchain protocol design
  • Incentives and economics
    • Staking economics
    • Transaction fee mechanism design
    • Incentivizing honest participation by blockchain validators
    • Economic mechanisms for mitigating MEV
  • Cryptography
    • Encrypted mempools and other cryptographic techniques for increasing transaction privacy and mitigating MEV
    • Efficiency and security of succinct non-interactive proof systems (SNARKs)
    • Improved advanced signature schemes (PQ aggregated signatures, better one-time signatures, linkable ring signatures, etc.) and other relevant cryptographic primitives (vector commitments, VRFs, etc.)
    • Post-quantum primitives that match the performance of their pre-quantum counterparts

People

headshot of tim roughgarden

Tim Roughgarden
Director

headshot of mahimna kelkar

Mahimna Kelkar 
Postdoctoral Research Scientist

 

Steering Committee Members

Related Events

More Events

December 10-11, 2025

Columbia CryptoEconomics Workshop

TBD

TBD