Advancing blockchain technology for business-scale performance with attention to privacy, transparency, and regulatability.

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Research Focus Area 

  • Zero Knowledge: Acceleration of zero-knowledge proofs on parallel architectures.  This project is optimizing use of GPUs in proof generation and exploring use of many GPUs in parallel.

  • Benchmarking Framework: Standardization of metrics and workload to the blockchain space, including the emerging “Layer 2” ecosystems.  

  • Hierarchical Consensus for Global Digital Currencies: Privacy, censorship-resistance, and compliance are all major concerns for a global digital currency. This project is constructing a hierarchy of separate consensus domains that allows transactional independence within regulatory jurisdictions while achieving the efficiencies and outreach (e.g., banking to the unbanked) that a digital currency can offer.

  • Transactional Privacy with Proof of Regulatory Compliance: Account-based transactional framework allowing anonymity and privacy while ensuring compliance with regulations.  Anonymity is within groups meeting certain properties (such as passing a KYC process) and privacy is achieved by zero-knowledge proofs over regulations expressed in software. The framework is parametrizable to allow any regulatory regime to be represented.
     

Undergraduate Capstone Projects 
Three current capstone projects using blockchain technology:

  • fair-trade coffee certification using blockchain-based proof-of-payment and supply-chain tracking
  • self-sovereign digital identity and verifiable credentials in supply-chain applications
  • blockchain-based intelligent agent platform for confidential cross-chain data sharing
     

For more details on blockchain-related work, and faculty involved in blockchain, see the Lehigh Blockchain website.

Research Focus Group Members
The focus group members working in the blockchain space cooperate closely with the Scalable Software Systems Group on the distributed algorithms underlying the design of blockchain systems, and with the Blockchain Lab in the Center for Financial Services on issues relating to blockchain-based financial systems.

  • Hank Korth, Lehigh University, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Director of the Blockchain Lab in the Center for Financial Services, and Courtesy Professor of Decision and Technology Analytics, and Courtesy Professor of Decision and Technology Analytics
  • Kathleen Hanley, Lehigh University, Bolton-Perella Chair Professor of Finance, Director of the Center for Financial Services
  • Ahmed Hassan, Lehigh University, Assistant Professor, Computer Science & Engineering
  • Roberto Palmieri, Lehigh University, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering

  • Patrick Zoro, Lehigh University, Master's in Financial Engineering Program Manager and Teaching Assistant Professor, Perella Department of Finance

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