research

Bitcoin often gets credited with inventing trustless consensus. It didn’t. The problem was named decades earlier — in the world of distributed computing — and researchers spent years studying how machines could reach agreement even when some participants were faulty, adversarial, or corrupt

On when and how adversarial nodes can be punished if they stall transaction confirmation in blockchains

Podcast: how blockchains are trying to maximize throughput and minimize latency

Gödel Prize winner Noam Nisan on the sum-check protocol — how a "purely theoretical" proof technique became the engine behind fast, modern SNARKs.

Turing Award winner Shafi Goldwasser tells the origin story of zero-knowledge proofs, from mental poker and interactive proofs to SNARKs, blockchain scaling, privacy, and verifiable AI.

Jolt is an open-source, RISC-V zkVM that is fast, secure, and easy to use -- a new, state-of-the-art approach to SNARK design that’s based on three years of research & development at a16zcrypto, which we open sourced for anyone to use or develop further. But Jolt is really a story that’s decades, and even millennia, in the making.

Timelines to a cryptographically relevant quantum computer are frequently overstated — leading to calls for urgent, wholesale transitions to post-quantum cryptography. But the real challenge in navigating a successful migration to post-quantum cryptography is matching urgency to actual threats.

Identifying a specific rewriting of the ECDSA signing equation and a method to compute and verify it

Introducing the notion of an exponent-VRF, or eVRF, a VRF that provides a generator of some finite cyclic group

A prediction market price can be interpreted as a probability sensor: an estimate of aggregate beliefs about the likelihood of an event

Early-stage crypto protocols should prioritize growth through token reinvestment rather than return value through buy-and-burn mechanisms.

Why did the Industrial Revolution take place where it did, and then spread beyond? It had to do with a competitive, open market of ideas, Mokyr argues -- a transnational “Republic of Letters” -- not unlike the crypto ethos of open source, decentralization, and more.