The results of the new round of Sui academic research funding have been announced: Global participation from several renowned universities, with 17 projects receiving over $420,000 in funding.

Recently, the Sui Foundation announced the winners of the new round of academic research funding program. This program aims to support research projects that promote the development of Web3, particularly in the frontier exploration of blockchain networks, smart contract programming, and technologies related to products built on Sui.

In the past two phases, a total of 17 research proposals from internationally renowned universities have been approved, with a total funding amount of $425,000. The participating universities include the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, University College London, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and the National University of Singapore.

Overview of Funded Projects

Research on the Diversity of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

Professor Ari Juels from Cornell University will conduct research on the nature of decentralized organizations. The project will establish metrics to measure the degree of decentralization of DAOs and explore practical methods to enhance the level of decentralization within organizations.

Adaptive Secure Asynchronous DAG Consensus Protocol

Professor Philipp Jovanovic of University College London proposed the development of an asynchronous DAG protocol to enhance resistance to attacks and adapt to changing threat environments. The protocol aims to provide higher security and adaptability while maintaining performance levels close to partially synchronous adversaries.

Sui smart contract auditing based on large language models

Professor Arthur Gervais from University College London plans to use large language models such as GPT-4-32k and Claude-v2-100k to improve the auditing process of Move smart contracts. The team previously analyzed 52 Solidity DeFi smart contracts and discovered vulnerabilities that led to nearly $1 billion in losses, and they are now expanding their research to Sui smart contracts.

Consensus Protocol Landscape

Professor Christopher Cachin from the University of Bern will conduct a comprehensive investigation into the current consensus field, providing new insights for cryptographic consensus protocols. The research findings will contribute to a deeper understanding of existing algorithms and offer new ideas for designing distributed protocols.

Decentralized Oracle Protocol Verification Framework

Professor Giselle Reis from Carnegie Mellon University and Bruno Woltzenlogel Paleo from Djed Alliance will create a framework to rigorously analyze and verify blockchain oracles through formal methods. The project will develop a comprehensive library of definitions and proof strategies within the Coq proof management system.

Blockchain Scalability Bottleneck Identification

Professor Roger Wattenhofer from ETH Zurich will focus on identifying scalability bottlenecks arising from design flaws in smart contracts and explore the impact of transaction fee adjustments on parallelization potential.

Bullshark Protocol Mechanized Verification

Professor Ilya Sergey from the National University of Singapore plans to use modern computer-aided verification tools to formally verify the properties of the Bullshark protocol, advancing the understanding of DAG-based consensus protocols.

Blockchain Benchmark Standardization Framework

Professor Henry F. Korth from Lehigh University proposed the creation of a standardized benchmark format for blockchain to fairly compare L1 blockchains and L2 scaling solutions, providing users and developers with transparent insights into chain performance.

Scalable Decentralized Shared Sorting Layer Construction

Professor Min Suk Kang from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology will explore using Bullshark/Mysticeti as a shared sorting algorithm, studying multiple Rollup solutions that use Sui as the sorting layer.

Local fee market and congestion pricing optimization

Professor Abdoulaye Ndiaye from New York University will study the local fee market to optimize the congestion pricing mechanism of blockchain networks, aiming to establish an effective pricing model that reflects the state of network congestion.

Shard Automatic Market Maker Mechanism

Professor Ittay Eyal from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology is developing the concept of sharded contracts, using multiple contracts to enhance concurrency. The research focuses on adjusting the incentive mechanisms for liquidity providers and traders to achieve fully parallelizable sharded AMMs.

Private Information Disclosure in Competitive Mechanisms

Professor Andrea Attar from the University of Roma Tor Vergata will explore new approaches to market mechanism design, studying the impact of designers privately disclosing information to agents on market outcomes and strategic interactions.

Sui smart contract generation based on large language models

Professors Ken Koedinger and Eason Chen from Carnegie Mellon University will focus on addressing the challenges that current large language models face in generating Move language smart contracts. The research includes collecting example datasets in Move language, enhancing prompt engineering, and implementing model fine-tuning.

Move language transition comparative metric framework

Professor George Giaglis from the University of Nicosia will conduct a comprehensive comparative analysis between Solidity and Move languages, aimed at promoting an in-depth understanding of Move's functionalities and capabilities, and assisting developers in transitioning to Move development more smoothly.

DeFi Optimization: Deep Learning Methods

Professors Rachid Guerraoui and Walid Sofiane from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne will develop a hybrid deep learning model for optimal range prediction in the Sui DeFi protocol, combining enhanced recurrent neural networks, deep reinforcement learning, and social media sentiment analysis.

SUI volatility prediction capability assessment

Professor Stavros Degiannakis of the Open University of Cyprus will investigate the effectiveness of the SPEC algorithm in predicting the volatility of Sui assets, focusing primarily on SUI assets and validating it with other blockchain assets.

low-memory post-quantum transparent zkSNARKs

Professors Brett Falk and Pratyush Mishra from the University of Pennsylvania are dedicated to developing scalable zkSNARKs to address major obstacles such as prover time complexity, space complexity, and SRS size, providing deployable scalable cryptographic proof solutions for various applications in blockchain technology.