National University of Singapore forms academic blockchain think tank

The National University of Singapore (NUS) has announced the creation of its new “Crystal Centre”, an academic research lab and think tank which it believes will become one of the world’s foremost hubs for blockchain research.

Science faculty at NUS, home to the School of Computing

The Cryptocurrency Strategy, Techniques and Algorithms – or Crystal – Centre, will be co-directed by assistant professor Prateek Saxena and associate professor Keith Carter at the School of Computing at NUS.

Scientific clarity

Its central aim is to provide scientific clarity in shaping technical research ideas. This will be led by experts in program language design and verification, distributed computing algorithms, cybersecurity, and market economics.

Previous work conducted by the Crystal-founding team led to the creation of private enterprises such as the Zilliqa blockchain platform and Kyber Network, the on-chain liquidity protocol.

The Crystal Centre will be funded through research gifts to open research on blockchain technology, although initial sponsorship comes from Zilliqa, Kyber, Quantstamp and venture capitalists NEO Global Capital, Chainfund and X-Order Institute.

Intuition and rigour

“We hope to make debates in the community more scientifically-grounded. The goal is to improve interaction between those armed with intuition and those with scientific rigour,” Saxena said.

He added: “We hope to draw attention to unforeseen scientific challenges, both near-term and long-term.”

Dr Xinshu Dong, chief executive of Zilliqa, said: “The research vision for Zilliqa’s sharding and our new secure programming language, Scilla, were born in collaboration with the team behind this Centre.”

“It’s incredible that we are now in a position for Zilliqa to contribute and collaborate with what will become one of the leading blockchain research centers in the world.”