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” ecosystem.  (Collaboration with the National University of Singapore).

  • Hierarchical Consensus and CBDCs: Privacy, censorship-resistance, and compliance are all major concerns with a move by central banks to a digital currency.  This project is constructing a hierarchy of separate consensus domains that allows a degree of transactional independence similar to that of the current global financial system while achieving the efficiencies and outreach (e.g., banking to the unbanked) that a digital currency can offer.

  • Financial Engineering: Application of data analytics, machine learning, and finance in the study of tokenomics, crypto trading strategies, covered interest-rate parity, and decentralized finance.

Undergrad Capstone Projects 
Four projects using blockchain technology: 

  • fair-trade coffee certification

  • smart-contract validation

  • self-sovereign digital identity and verifiable credentials

  • CBDCs

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 enterprise-friendly 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
  • Kathleen Hanley, Lehigh University, Bolton-Perella Chair Professor of Finance, Director of the Center for Financial Services
  • Ahmed Hassan, Professor of Practice, Computer Science & Engineering
  • Roberto Palmieri, Lehigh University, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Co-Leader of the Scalable Systems and Software Research Group

  • Patrick Zoro, Lehigh University, Teaching Assitant Professor, Perella Department of Finance

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