From the Lecture Hall
to the Real World

IC3 bridges the gap between academic rigor and practical application. We drive the research, hackathons, and global events shaping the frontier of blockchain and AI.

New: Crypto x AI Survey Paper

About Us

We are a consortium of academic researchers across 13 universities focused on foundational research in blockchain systems. Our goal is to take concepts from the whiteboard and apply them in the real world.

With expertise spanning applied cryptography, consensus protocols, distributed systems, programming language theory, and game-theoretic mechanism design, our research has played an ongoing, pivotal role in shaping the blockchain industry as we know it.

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Featured Research

IC3 publishes research on blockchain, cryptography, decentralized systems, AI and more.

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Five Facts About Stablecoins

Using granular blockchain data from 2020 to 2025, the study finds that stablecoins are increasingly functioning as tokenized money. Their transaction volume now exceeds Bitcoin’s, velocity has increased, and usage has shifted toward smaller everyday transfers. A new Bayesian geolocation method shows stablecoin activity is broadly distributed across major global regions while earlier approaches overestimated cross-border flows. The authors also find that stablecoin wallets exhibit cash-management behavior similar to traditional money holdings, and that stablecoins are fueling a growing onchain lending market without reducing overall credit creation. Furthermore, stablecoins enable programmable and machine-to-machine payments, with smart contracts accounting for a significant share of transactions and volume. Together, these findings suggest that stablecoins are evolving into a widely used form of digital money with important implications for financial markets and regulation…

Crossroads: A Smart Contract Layer for Chain-Abstracted Assets

Crossroads is a chain-abstraction platform that represents assets from nearly any blockchain as ERC-20 tokens on a single backend blockchain, allowing them to seamlessly participate in applications such as trading, lending, staking, and privacy-preserving payments. Using a threshold-signing committee with encumbered keys, Crossroads securely manages assets across integrated chains while enabling efficient transfers, user-controlled withdrawal fees, and permissionless onboarding of new blockchains through modular oracle designs. By combining strong security guarantees, flexible interoperability, and support for advanced cross-chain applications, Crossroads aims to provide a unified and scalable alternative to traditional blockchain bridges…

Time Is Money: Incentivized Causal Transaction Ordering

PRECEDE is a blockchain transaction-ordering mechanism designed to prevent front-running by eliminating the economic incentives that enable it. Rather than ordering transactions solely by fees, PRECEDE uses a power-weighted randomized lottery, where higher bids increase the chance of being selected but do not guarantee priority. This creates an equilibrium in which legitimate users can submit deterrent bids that discourage attackers from competing, thereby preserving rewards for functional transactions and enforcing effective transaction causality. PRECEDE also prevents common attacks such as sandwich attacks and can be deployed on any censorship-resistant blockchain through a simple modification to its transaction ordering mechanism…

Events & Hackathons

IC3 events connect people across the blockchain industry to share ideas, discuss innovations, and help shape the future of blockchain technology.

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The Science of Blockchain Conference 2026

July 27-29, 2026

SBC focuses on technical innovations in the blockchain ecosystem, and brings together researchers and practioners working in the space.

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IC3 Blockchain Camp 2026

June 1-7, 2026

The IC3 Blockchain Camp is one of our biggest events of the year, and the 2026 edition did not disappoint. Princeton University was the main venue for this year’s event.

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