UW Blockchain Lab

In the big data era, the digital commons (and associated data and control) are increasingly controlled by a small number of platforms that intermediate digital interactions. Blockchains are an emerging paradigm for permissionless distributed computing, that can remove the intermediary while at the same time providing trusted computing and storage guarantees. While applications of blockchains beyond cryptocurrencies into generalized digital platforms, are still in their beginning stages, blockchain technology is expected to create several trillion dollars of value in the next few years, potentially aiding the democratization of trust, data and control in digital platforms. In our research, we take a first-principles, full-stack approach to blockchains: we view blockchains as a whole integrated system involving networking, distributed consensus, data storage, incentives, and applications. We explore the foundations of how each of these layers are designed (these foundational design principles as well as specific algorithms are the subject of cutting-edge research). A central feature of these blockchain protocols is to tolerate adversarial users as well as rational users. While much pioneering work has happened in distributed computing on tolerating adversaries, it has focused on the permissioned setting, where there is a permission authority that decides which nodes participate in the protocol. We focus on the permissionless setting without a central permissioning authority. Proving security results in this setting involves understanding convergence of certain random processes on trees (including branching random walks) under adversarial actions. Random processes plays a central role in the understanding of blockchains. Our research entails ideas from a variety of theoretical areas including, but not limited to, distributed computing, information theory, queuing theory, networking, coding theory and game theory in designing these systems successfully.