From the Lecture Hall
to the Real World
IC3 bridges the gap between academic rigor and practical application. We drive the research, hackathons, and global events shaping the frontier of blockchain and AI.
About Us
We are a consortium of academic researchers across 13 universities focused on foundational research in blockchain systems. Our goal is to take concepts from the whiteboard and apply them in the real world.
With expertise spanning applied cryptography, consensus protocols, distributed systems, programming language theory, and game-theoretic mechanism design, our research has played an ongoing, pivotal role in shaping the blockchain industry as we know it.
Featured Research
IC3 publishes research on blockchain, cryptography, decentralized systems, AI and more.
Test of Time Award – USENIX 2026: Stealing Machine Learning Models via Prediction APIs
Congratulations to IC3’s Ari Juels and Fan Zhang, along with Florian Tramèr (ETH Zürich), Mike Reiter (Duke University), and Thomas Ristenpart (University of Toronto), for receiving the USENIX Security Test of Time Award for their 2016 paper. This award recognizes outstanding work in computing systems security and privacy research that has had a lasting impact on the field. A decade ago, the researchers proved that an adversary could fully reconstruct proprietary machine learning models simply by interacting with their public prediction APIs. Without knowing how a model was trained or seeing its internal code, they successfully extracted models from platforms like Amazon Machine Learning and BigML. The authors showed that basic defenses, such as hiding output confidence values, only slow attackers down rather than stop them. As AI models become deeply integrated into business and security infrastructure, this work remains a foundational blueprint for the AI era…
Track me if you can: Ephemeral coin tracing
Balancing user privacy with regulatory compliance has long felt like an impossible tradeoff. Traditional coin-tracing schemes mark a transaction once and track it forever. With no time or geographic limits, regulators gradually accumulate permanent coverage over the entire network, eroding user privacy. New IC3 research proposes a solution: Ephemeral Coin Tracing (ECT). Instead of permanent surveillance, ECT grants regulators temporary tracing tags that degrade with every transaction “hop.” After a fixed number of transfers, the tag automatically self-destructs into a value completely indistinguishable from an untraced coin—even to the regulator who issued it. By ensuring tracing authority strictly expires, ECT strikes a critical balance between regulatory compliance and long-term user privacy. Co-author François-Xavier Wicht presented this in April to Yale’s Applied Cryptography Laboratory...
The Price of Decentralization in Block Building
In this paper, researchers analyze whether decentralized (multi-proposer) mechanisms improve global transaction coverage or simply cause builders to cluster in high-value geographic hubs. By modeling this dynamic as a latency-driven, stochastic coverage game with equal-split rewards, they prove the system reliably reaches a stable state (a pure Nash equilibrium). Even though builders act in their own self-interest, they still manage to keep the network functional. The authors establish a tight factor-2 “Price of Anarchy” bound, proving that uncoordinated, self-interested builders achieve at least 50% of the optimal coverage value attainable by a perfect central planner. They also demonstrate that builder profits avoid runaway monopolies, with the lowest-earning builder guaranteed to secure at least half of the highest earner’s payoff. Ultimately, the paper mathematically exposes a hidden design flaw in how decentralized networks are built. Standard profit-sharing incentives unintentionally push server operators into the same high-value hubs, minimizing the broad geographic distribution needed for optimal transaction coverage and true censorship resistance….
Events & Hackathons
IC3 events connect people across the blockchain industry to share ideas, discuss innovations, and help shape the future of blockchain technology.
The Science of Blockchain Conference 2026
July 27-29, 2026
SBC focuses on technical innovations in the blockchain ecosystem, and brings together researchers and practioners working in the space.
IC3 Blockchain Camp 2026
June 1-7, 2026
The IC3 Blockchain Camp is one of our biggest events of the year, and the 2026 edition did not disappoint. Princeton University was the main venue for this year’s event.
IC3 Winter Retreat 2026
January 6-8, 2026
Pack your skis — we’re heading back to Hotel Terrace in Engelberg, Switzerland, for the 2026 Winter Retreat!
IC3 Partners
IC3 acknowledges and appreciates a generous gift from the VMware Foundation to advance the science and technology of blockchains.
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