In order to further support the rapid growth of the Chainlink ecosystem, we’ve recently released the Chainlink Community Grant Program as a means of providing important financial resources to the many development teams and researchers building Chainlink, as well as the many additional developer resources that enable easy access to the network. Our goal with the grant program is to deploy substantial financial resources towards the creation of critical developer tooling, the addition of more high-quality data, and the launching of key services around the Chainlink Network, with key academic research to support those developments. We encourage all the talented individual developers and development teams in our community to apply to the grant program here, or if you are a researcher and want to collaborate, contact us here.

We are excited to announce that Giulia Fanti, a leading blockchain and distributed systems academic researcher, has been selected as a research grant recipient from the Chainlink Community Grant Program. As part of the research grant, Giulia will be collaborating with Chainlink Labs and our research team to work on the future development of the Chainlink Network, further expanding the number of world-class academics and developers helping build Chainlink.

Giulia’s research interests span the algorithmic foundations of blockchains, distributed systems, privacy-preserving technologies, and machine learning. She is receiving a Chainlink grant specifically to further her work on:

• Order fairness as part of Chainlink’s Fair Sequencing Services — using Chainlink oracle networks to achieve fair transaction ordering for blockchain transactions to reduce MEV
• Further improvements in scalability for the networking around Chainlink’s off-chain aggregation — building secure, high-throughput oracle computation at a cost-effective price

Giulia Fanti is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. She is also a faculty member/scientist at the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3), the premier cryptocurrency and smart contract academic research center, and fellow for the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Cybersecurity. She obtained her Ph.D. in EECS from U.C. Berkeley and her B.S. in ECE from Olin College of Engineering.

Her research has received best paper awards from ACM Sigmetrics and ACM MobiHoc, as well as an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Additionally, her work on anonymous routing for cryptocurrencies (Dandelion) has been assigned a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) number (156) and has been/is being integrated in production into BitMessage, Grin, and soon ZCoin.

“I’m glad to be collaborating with Chainlink Labs to study the effects of network dynamics on order fairness, and specifically how these effects could impact an oracle network like Chainlink,” stated Fanti. “The Chainlink Research team is at the cutting edge of blockchain oracle technologies, and I look forward to expanding upon their foundations by researching how oracles communicating over imperfect networks can fairly order transactions in decentralized settings. By building more useful oracle networks, we can vastly expand the capabilities of smart contracts to produce value in the real world.”

Through the Chainlink Community Grants program, we look forward to continuing to empower more and more Chainlink ecosystem teams and researchers who are both researching and building key tools and infrastructure that accelerate the development of hybrid smart contracts and secure oracle networks. We will continue supporting the community as a key driver of Chainlink’s rapid growth, because only together can we make hybrid smart contracts into the dominant form of digital agreement.

About the Chainlink Grant Program

If you want to learn more about the Grant Program, check out our recent blog post that further expands upon its goals and the criteria for submission. If you would like to participate in the Chainlink Grant Program, please apply here. Chainlink Community Grants are provided in Cash and/or LINK.