About CRYSTAL Centre

What will we do?

CRYSTAL centre will bridge the gap between the folklore and market concerns, and rigorous computational thinking. It will provide scientific clarity to technical ideas in regard to blockchains and cryptocurrencies, make debates in the community more scientifically-grounded, and will draw attention to unforeseen scientific challenges and engage with the community.

The University Centre will have an emphasis on advancing:

Research on scalability, security and provable safety for blockchain protocols;
Community of technical experts who can conceive and enable faster adoption.

What will we do?

OUR GOALS

To create the world’s leading think-tank for blockchain research and technology. To provide scientific clarity to technical ideas in blockchains and cryptocurrencies.
We hope to make debates in the community more scientifically-grounded and to improve interaction between those armed with intuition and those with scientific rigor.
We will draw attention to (unforeseen) scientific challenges, both near-term and long-term, through a new model of engagement with the community.

Our Research Focus

Cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrencies and their underlying distributed ledger protocols (blockchains) are spurring an ecosystem of decentralized applications and innovation systems.

Currently, the market capitalization of cryptocurrencies is valued at about 2.48 trillion dollars; and its acceptance by institutional and commercial players is steadily increasing. Increasingly, smart contracts programs that run on blockchains are showcasing a new paradigm for transparent and trustworthy computing.

Security

There are several security issues with blockchain, which our centre aims to explore and find solutions to:

Vulnerabilities of computers that individuals and business use to retrieve blockchain services
Hackers retrieving the keys to someone’s data on blockchain and being able to own it completely, as possessing with public and private key to a blockchain are synonymous with owning the content
Constant scaling up of the chain mean there is no certain way to confirm it will stay secure
Blockchain is experimental and there is code that hasn’t been tested
The lack of standards and regulation

Tools

Cryptocurrency markets do not have a clear fundamental understanding of causality and correlation between token prices. CRYSTAL Centre will build capability and phrase measurable scientific analytics of Cryptocurrency market drivers. Example including: liquidity and valuations, virtual sandbox for market analysis. AI vs AI research, applying deep learning to improve level 3 order book process, and training fund for real market activity.

Algorithm

Our goal is to design and analyse new algorithms which allow scaling with network size or consumption power, and lowering energy consumption. Consensus protocols in blockchains differ from traditional networks because the set of participants in the protocols is not fixed and not know in advance to each other. We have recently shown how to use proof of work (POW) as a basis for reconciling differing views in a peer to peer network with open (and potentially infinite) membership.