The Chainlink Community Grant Program provides financial resources to the many development teams and researchers building a more functional and accessible Chainlink Network. We encourage talented individual developers and development teams to apply to the grant program here, or if you are a researcher and want to collaborate, contact us.

We are excited to announce that the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3), a leading academic research organization, has been selected to receive a second Chainlink Research Grant. This grant will support IC3 in continuing its world-leading research into improving Chainlink infrastructure and the wider smart contract ecosystem, building on research supported by a previous Chainlink Research Grant.

IC3’s smart contract research brings together finance with computer science in unprecedented ways, spurring the development of new financial instruments and feature-rich applications. IC3 researchers published 10+ papers relevant to smart contracts in 2021, two of which won prestigious awards:

• Rafael Pass and Yanyi Liu Win won the Best Paper Award at CRYPTO ’21 for their paper On the Possibility of Basing Cryptography on EXP not equal BPP. 
• Ethan Cecchetti, Siqiu Yao, Haobin Ni, and Andrew C. Myers won the Best Paper Award at 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy for their work on Compositional Security for Reentrant Applications.

This second grant will build upon this exciting work and explore new areas of research, covering both oracle networks like Chainlink and the underlying blockchain, smart contract, and data infrastructure that Chainlink supports. Through this research, IC3 will help identify new ways to further develop high-performance systems for the storing and handling of high-value cryptocurrencies and confidential transactions. Critically, this research is designed to help create practical smart contract solutions that are easy to program and formally verifiable, with provable security properties that meet the blockchain community’s expectations for efficiency and reliability. 

In addition, this grant will help align the world’s best researchers, industry-leading protocols, and traditional finance and technology institutions. In addition to Chainlink, IC3 has also received support from the Ethereum Foundation, Fidelity Center for Applied Technology, IBM, Intel, J.P. Morgan, Novi, and Protocol Labs. Ultimately this grant will support the production of cutting-edge academic research, with Chainlink then helping make it accessible to the open-source software sector where it can make a real-world impact and be leveraged by leading institutions. 

IC3 is a collaborative research initiative for smart contract technology based at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, consisting of faculty members from prestigious universities such as Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, Cornell Tech, EPFL, ETH Zurich, UC Berkeley, University College London, and the Technion.

IC3 is led by Director Ari Juels (Cornell) and Associate Directors Andrew Miller (UIUC), Sarah Meiklejohn (UCL), and Ittay Eyal (Technion). Ari Juels is a professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech. He was previously chief scientist at RSA and is currently chief scientist of Chainlink Labs.

“We are excited to receive a second research grant from the Chainlink Grant Program, enabling us to continue academic research that will help the smart contract ecosystem further leverage Chainlink’s powerful oracle infrastructure,” stated Jim Ballingall, IC3 Executive Director. “Original research is integral to the progress of the smart contract ecosystem, and this grant will help today’s proofs-of-concept become tomorrow’s fast and reliable systems of execution and record.”

Through the Chainlink Community Grants program, we look forward to continuing to empower 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 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.