Our Focus
FDCI's areas of research are many. Digital currencies touch many sectors of the economy and must be developed through multiple academic disciplines to ensure ripple effects of technological choices are thoroughly evaluated.
Our Research
FDCI is pursuing research through multiple avenues, through the FDCI lab itself, and through our affiliated faculty's ongoing projects linked below.
Speedex - SPEEDEX is a decentralized exchange (DEX) that lets participants securely trade assets without giving any single party undue control over the market. SPEEDEX offers several advantages over prior DEXes. It achieves high throughput—over 200,000 transactions per second on 48-coreservers, even with tens of millions of open offers. SPEEDEX runs entirely within a Layer-1 blockchain, and thus achieves its scalability without fragmenting market liquidity between multiple blockchains or rollups. It eliminates internal arbitrage opportunities, so that a direct trade from asset A to B always receives as good a price as trading through some third asset such as USD. Finally, it prevents certain front-running attacks that would otherwise increase the effective bid-ask spread for small traders.
Groundhog - Groundhog is a novel design for a smart contract execution engine based around concurrent execution of blocks of transactions. Unlike prior work, transactions within a block in Groundhog are not ordered relative to one another. Instead, our key design insights are first, to design a set of commutative semantics that lets the Groundhog runtime deterministically resolve concurrent accesses to shared data. Second, some storage accesses (such as withdrawing money from an account) conflict irresolvably; Groundhog therefore enforces validity constraints on persistent storage accesses via 2-phase locking. These two ideas give Groundhog a set of semantics that, while not as powerful as traditional sequential semantics, are flexible enough to implement a wide variety of important applications and are strictly more powerful than the semantics used in some production blockchains today. Unlike prior smart contract systems, transactions throughput never suffers from contention between transactions. Using 96 CPU cores, Groundhog can process more than half a million payment transactions per second, whether between 10M accounts or just 2.
Deterministic Client
Digital Currency - the US and China
AI-Algorithmic Traders Lead to Market Instability
Stable Coins Real Economy
