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. If you are a researcher and you want to collaborate, contact us here.

We are excited to announce that Professor Xiao Wang, a leading computer security, privacy, and cryptography researcher, has been selected as a research grant recipient from the Chainlink Community Grant Program. As part of the research grant, Xiao will be collaborating with Chainlink Labs and our research team to work on the future development of DECO’s privacy-preserving oracle technology, further expanding the Chainlink Network’s ability to greatly increase the amount of private & premium data available for use by all Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 applications.

Xiao’s research interests focus on applied cryptography, specifically on designing efficient privacy-preserving systems based on secure multi-party computation. He is receiving a Chainlink grant to collaborate on accelerating DECO’s application to the Chainlink Network in ways that provide additional privacy guarantees to both users and data sources.

Xiao Wang is an assistant professor of computer science at Northwestern University. He’s currently conducting a joint post-doctoral fellowship with Vinod Vaikuntanathan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ran Canetti at Boston University. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland and his B.E. in C.S. from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Currently, he’s working on practical multi-party computation, zero-knowledge proof, oblivious RAM, and post-quantum cryptography. For his work, he received a Best Paper Award in Applied Cyber Security at CSAW 2015, an iDASH Competition Award in 2015, a Human Longevity Inc. Award for MPC in 2016, and an ACM CCS Best Paper Award in 2017.

“I’m glad to be collaborating with Chainlink Labs to further my research on zero-knowledge proof cryptography and how it can be leveraged by oracle networks to make sensitive data available on-chain while keeping it completely confidential,” stated Wang. “Through the development of DECO, the Chainlink Research team has pioneered cutting edge research into privacy preserving oracle technologies, and I look forward to collaborating with them to further this research so it can be applied in the real world, greatly expanding the value proposition of smart contracts.”

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.