Sui's New Round of Academic Research Funding Program Results Announced: World-renowned Universities Participated, 17 Projects Received Over 420,000 USD in Support

Recently, the Sui Foundation announced the winners of a new round of academic research funding. This program aims to support research that promotes the development of Web3, with a particular focus on breakthroughs in blockchain networks, smart contract programming, and technologies related to products built on Sui.

In the past two phases, a total of 17 research proposals from internationally renowned universities have been approved, with a total funding amount of $425,000. Participating universities include the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, University College London, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and National University of Singapore, among others.

The following is a brief introduction to some of the award-winning proposals:

1. DAOs: Diversity of Voting Groups Ari Juels from Cornell University will study the nature of decentralized organizations, establish metrics for measuring the degree of decentralization of DAOs, and explore practical methods to enhance decentralization within organizations.

2. Adaptive Secure Asynchronous DAG Protocol Consensus Philipp Jovanovic from University College London proposed the development of an asynchronous DAG protocol to enhance attack resistance and adapt to changing adversarial environments. The protocol aims to provide better security and adaptability while maintaining performance levels close to those of partially synchronous adversaries.

3. Sui Smart Contract Audit Guided by Large Language Models The Arthur Gervais team at University College London will use large language models such as GPT-4-32k and Claude-v2-100k to improve the auditing process of Move smart contracts. This project will apply their previous research findings on Solidity DeFi contracts to Sui smart contracts.

4. Mapping Consensus Protocol Domain Christopher Cachin from the University of Bern will investigate the current consensus field to provide new insights into cryptographic consensus protocols, aiding in a better understanding of existing algorithms and offering new ideas for designing distributed protocols.

5. High-Trust Verification Framework for Decentralized Oracle Protocols Giselle Reis from Carnegie Mellon University and Bruno Woltzenlogel Paleo from Djed Alliance will create a framework to rigorously analyze and verify blockchain oracles through formal methods, ensuring the accuracy and fairness of external data in smart contracts.

6. Identify scalability bottlenecks Roger Wattenhofer from ETH Zurich will study how to improve the parallelization potential of blockchain applications by identifying design flaws in smart contracts and explore the impact of adjusting transaction fees on parallelization.

7. Bullshark Protocol Mechanization Ilya Sergey from the National University of Singapore aims to formally verify the properties of Bullshark using modern computer-aided verification tools, advancing the understanding of DAG-based consensus protocols.

8. BBSF: Blockchain Benchmarking Standard Framework Henry F. Korth of the University of Lihaik will create a standardized format for blockchain benchmarking to fairly compare L1 blockchains and L2 scaling solutions, providing users and developers with transparent insights into chain performance.

9. Build a scalable and decentralized shared sequencing layer Min Suk Kang from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology will explore the use of Bullshark/Mysticeti as a shared sorting algorithm, investigating the possibility of running multiple Rollups on Sui.

10. Local fee market for optimal congestion pricing Abdoulaye Ndiaye from New York University will study the local fee market to optimize congestion pricing, aiming to establish an effective pricing mechanism that reflects congestion levels for optimal resource allocation.

These research projects cover multiple key areas of blockchain technology, from consensus protocols and smart contract security to decentralized finance and oracle systems. Their results are expected to bring significant breakthroughs and innovations to the Sui ecosystem and the entire blockchain industry.