2024 SDF Research Year in Review

Back in 2023, the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) established a research team that collaborates with academic and industry researchers to tackle scientific problems that show potential for furthering SDF’s mission of equitable access to financial services and that can benefit the whole blockchain ecosystem.

SDF’s research team contributes to the research community similarly to how many academics do. We work on novel scientific problems and publish and give talks about our results in academic venues (peer-reviewed conferences and journals, workshops, etc.). In addition, we serve the community by organizing scientific workshops, reviewing papers, participating in program committees of conferences, teaching, and offering research internships for PhD students. Finally, we run SDF’s academic research-grants program.

A lot happened in 2024, so we wanted to provide a brief summary of everything we accomplished.

1. Evolution of the team

In April 2024, Iftach Haitner (Professor at Tel-Aviv University, on leave) joined SDF as a full-time researcher in cryptography. With our other researcher Giuliano Losa, who focuses on distributed computing and formal methods, this brought our small team to two full-time researchers. To complement our in-house team, we also worked with two part-time contractors, Eli Gafni (Professor Emeritus, UCLA) and Moshen Lesani (Associate Professor, UC Santa Cruz), and two research interns, Yunqi Zhang (PhD candidate, Ohio State University) and Patrick Redmond (PhD candidate, UC Santa Cruz).

2. Workshops

Swen Jacobs (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security) and Giuliano Losa organized the 11th Workshop on Formal Reasoning in Distributed Algorithm (FRIDA 2024) as part of CAV 2024. The workshop brought together researchers from both industry and academia. More information at https://frida-2024.github.io/

3. Publications

Work involving SDF’s researchers led to 3 peer-reviewed publications.

• In collaboration with Xuechao Wang and his student Qianyu Yu at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou): Qianyu Yu, Giuliano Losa, and Xuechao Wang. “TetraBFT: Reducing Latency of Unauthenticated, Responsive BFT Consensus.” In Proceedings of the 43rd ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pp. 257-267. 2024.
• In collaboration with Francesco D’Amato and Luca Zanolini of the Ethereum Foundation: Francesco D’Amato, Giuliano Losa, and Luca Zanolini. “Asynchrony-Resilient Sleepy Total-Order Broadcast Protocols.” In Proceedings of the 43rd ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pp. 247-256. 2024.
• Giuliano Losa and Eli Gafni. “Brief Announcement: Understanding Read-Write Wait-Free Coverings in the Fully-Anonymous Shared-Memory Model.” In Proceedings of the 43rd ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pp. 465-468. 2024.

Another work on peer-to-peer overlays is scheduled to appear at Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2025 in April 2025, and we have a number of projects in the pipeline in cryptography, distributed computing, and formal methods. In particular, Iftach has been ramping up his work in Cryptography and now has 5 papers under submission, including:

• In collaboration with Dan Boneh, Iftach Haitner and Yehuda Lindell.

Exponent-VRFs and Their Applications.

• In collaboration with Iftach Haitner with Yehuda Lindell and Nikolaos Makriyannis. Integer Commitments, Old and New Tools.
• In collaboration with Iftach Haitner and Yonatan Karidi-Heller.A Tight Lower Bound on Adaptively Secure Full-Information Coin Flip

4. Talks

Member of SDF’s research team gave 5 research talks in 2024:

• On December 17th, 2024, Giuliano gave a remote talk on Federated Byzantine Agreement at the WIDE Workshop in Rennes, France.
• On September 10th, 2024, Giuliano gave a talk on formally-verifying liveness properties of consensus algorithms at the TLA+ Community Meeting in Milan, Italy.
• On September 5th, 2024, Giuliano gave a talk on Federated Byzantine Agreement during the Dagstuhl Seminar “Next-Generation Secure Distributed Computing” in Dagstuhl, Germany.
• On June 20th, 2024, Giuliano presented the paper “Brief Announcement: Understanding Read-Write Wait-Free Coverings in the Fully-Anonymous Shared-Memory Model” at the PODC 2024 conference in Nantes, France.
• On June 19th, 2024, Giuliano presented the paper “Asynchrony-Resilient Sleepy Total-Order Broadcast Protocols” at the PODC 2024 conference in Nantes, France.