About CRYSTAL Centre

What do we do?

CRYSTAL Centre aims to bridge the gap between the folklore and market concerns, and rigorous computational thinking. Cryptocurrency, Strategy, Techniques, and Algorithms (CRYSTAL) Centre focuses on research in the areas of cryptocurrencies, blockchains, financial technologies and other related technologies.

The University Centre emphasizes 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.
To make debates in the community more scientifically-grounded and to improve interaction between those armed with intuition and those with scientific rigor.
To 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 unremittingly growing. Increasingly, smart contract programming that runs on blockchains is showcasing a new paradigm for transparent and trustworthy computing.

Security

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

Vulnerabilities of computers that individuals and businesses use to retrieve blockchain services
Hackers retrieving the keys to someone’s data on blockchains, where possessing public and private keys to a blockchain is synonymous with owning the content completely
Uncertain security due to constant scaling-up of the chains
Un-tested codes of blockchains which are still experimental
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 strives to build capability and phrase measurable scientific analytics of cryptocurrency market drivers such as 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 analyze new algorithms which allow scaling of network size and consumption power, and lowering of energy consumption. Consensus protocols in blockchains differ from traditional networks such that the set of participants in the protocols is not fixed and not known in advance to each other. We have recently presented on 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.