Results of the latest Sui Academic Research Award announced: Top global universities participate, 17 projects receive $420,000 in funding

Recently, the Sui Foundation announced the list of winners for the new round of academic research grants. The program aims to fund research projects that promote the development of Web3, particularly cutting-edge technologies related to blockchain networks, smart contract programming, and products built on Sui.

In the past two phases, a total of 17 proposals from internationally renowned universities have been approved, with a total funding amount of $425,000. 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 Awarded Projects

DAOs: A Study on Voting Group Diversity

Professor Ari Juels from Cornell University will focus on researching the nature of decentralized organizations, establishing metrics to measure the degree of decentralization of DAOs, and exploring practical methods to enhance decentralization within organizations.

Adaptive Secure Asynchronous DAG Protocol Consensus

The team led by Philipp Jovanovic at University College London plans to develop an asynchronous DAG protocol to enhance resilience against attacks and adapt to an ever-changing adversarial environment. The protocol aims to provide higher security and adaptability while maintaining performance levels close to partially synchronous adversaries.

Sui Smart Contract Audit Based on Large Language Models

Professor Arthur Gervais from University College London will use large language models such as GPT-4-32k and Claude-v2-100k to audit Move smart contracts. This project will expand from the preliminary analysis of 52 Solidity DeFi smart contracts to the security assessment of Sui smart contracts.

Mapping Consensus Protocol Field

Professor Christopher Cachin from the University of Bern will conduct a comprehensive investigation into the current field of consensus, providing new insights into cryptographic consensus protocols that will help better understand existing algorithms and provide new ideas for designing distributed protocols.

High Trust Verification Framework for Decentralized Oracle Protocols

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, ensuring the accuracy and fairness of external data in smart contracts.

Identify scalability bottlenecks

Professor Roger Wattenhofer from ETH Zurich will focus on identifying bottlenecks stemming from design flaws in smart contracts to enhance the parallelization potential of blockchain applications, and will explore the impact of adjusting transaction fees on this parallelization potential.

Bullshark Protocol Mechanization

Professor Ilya Sergey from the National University of Singapore will use modern computer-aided verification tools to formally verify the properties of Bullshark, advancing the understanding of consensus protocols based on directed acyclic graphs.

BBSF: Blockchain Benchmarking Standard Framework

Professor Henry F. Korth from Lehigh University aims to create 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.

Build a scalable and decentralized shared sequence layer

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

local fee market for optimal congestion pricing

Professor Abdoulaye Ndiaye from New York University will study the local fee market to optimize congestion pricing, exploring the establishment of an effective pricing mechanism that reflects congestion status for optimal resource allocation.

SAMM: Sharded Automated Market Maker

Professor Ittay Eyal from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology is developing the concept of sharding contracts, utilizing multiple contracts to increase concurrency. The research aims to adjust the incentives for liquidity providers and traders to maintain multiple AMM shards, achieving fully parallelizable sharded AMMs.

Private Disclosure in Competitive Mechanisms

Professor Andrea Attar from the University of Tor Vergata in Rome will explore new methods of market mechanism design, studying the impact of private information disclosure from designers to agents on market outcomes and strategic interactions.

Use large language models to generate Sui smart contracts

Professors Ken Koedinger and Eason Chen from Carnegie Mellon University will fine-tune large language models using Move code and Sui-specific prompts to address the current challenges faced by LLMs in generating Move language smart contracts.

COMET: Transitioning to Move’s Comparative Metrics and Framework

Professor George Giaglis from the University of Nicosia will conduct a comprehensive comparative analysis between Solidity and Move, facilitating a deeper understanding of Move’s functionalities and capabilities, helping developers transition smoothly to using Move for development.

Revolutionary DeFi: Deep Learning Methods to Optimize Liquidity and Dynamic Fees on Sui

Professors Rachid Guerraoui and Walid Sofiane from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne will develop a hybrid deep learning model for optimal range prediction in the Sui DeFi protocol, aiming to enhance the responsiveness of DeFi protocols to market changes.

Assessing the predictive ability of SUI volatility

Professor Stavros Degiannakis from Open University of Cyprus will investigate the effectiveness of the SPEC algorithm in predicting the volatility of Sui assets, focusing primarily on SUI, and will validate it across various blockchain assets.

low-memory post-quantum transparent zkSNARKs

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

These research projects cover multiple key areas of blockchain technology, from decentralized organizations to smart contract security, from consensus mechanisms to market design. By supporting these cutting-edge research efforts, the Sui Foundation is paving the way for the long-term development and innovation of the Web3 ecosystem.