From the Lecture Hall
to the Real World

IC3 bridges the gap between academic rigor and practical application. We drive the research, hackathons, and global events shaping the frontier of blockchain and AI.

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About Us

We are a consortium of academic researchers across 13 universities focused on foundational research in blockchain systems. Our goal is to take concepts from the whiteboard and apply them in the real world.

With expertise spanning applied cryptography, consensus protocols, distributed systems, programming language theory, and game-theoretic mechanism design, our research has played an ongoing, pivotal role in shaping the blockchain industry as we know it.

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Featured Research

IC3 publishes research on blockchain, cryptography, decentralized systems, AI and more.

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TxRay: Agentic Postmortem of Live Blockchain Attacks

It’s easy to know when a hack has taken place. The money is gone. But even on a public blockchain, it can take investigators weeks or months to figure out what went wrong. TxRay can do it in 40 minutes and matches expert conclusions 92% of the time…

Resilient Alerting Protocols for Blockchains

The paper studies how to prevent attackers from bribing participants to suppress important alerts for smart contracts. It defines the alerting problem and shows that optimal protocols can force attackers to pay quadratically higher bribery costs than simple designs. The authors present three protocols—two constant‑time and one sequential—that all achieve this optimal bribery resistance but with different tradeoffs in synchrony assumptions, storage overhead, and execution time…

Boost+: Equitable, Incentive-Compatible Block Building

In blockchain ecosystems, block space is prime real estate. Ethereum’s block-building market is currently dominated by MEV-Boost. The authors raise concerns regarding centralization, unfair competitive advantages, and a lack of transparency that comes with MEV-Boost’s integration…