Fanti Awarded Second Chainlink Research Grant

The Chainlink Community Grant Program recently announced that Giulia Fanti, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and a leading academic researcher on blockchain and distributed systems, has been selected as a research grant recipient by the Chainlink Community Grant Program. This grant will support Fanti in continuing her collaboration with the Chainlink Labs research team on the development of the Chainlink Network, building on the work she completed as part of a previous Chainlink Research Grant.

Fanti’s research interests span the algorithmic foundations of blockchains; the security, privacy, and efficiency of distributed systems; privacy-preserving technologies; and machine learning. This Chainlink Research Grant will support Fanti in furthering her work on:

• Order fairness as part of Chainlink Fair Sequencing Services (FSS)—using Chainlink oracle networks to achieve fair transaction ordering for blockchain transactions in order to help reduce Miner-Extractable Value (MEV).
• Further improvements in scalability for the networking around Chainlink’s off-chain aggregation, allowing for secure, high-throughput, and cost-effective oracle computation.

Fanti is a former fellow of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Cybersecurity and a member of the NIST Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board. She is a recipient of best paper awards from ACM Sigmetrics and ACM MobiHoc, as well as faculty research awards from the Sloan Foundation, Intel, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, Google, and J.P. Morgan Chase. She obtained her Ph.D. in EECS from U.C. Berkeley and her B.S. in ECE from Olin College of Engineering.

“I’m excited to be collaborating further with Chainlink Labs to study how order fairness dynamics can impact a decentralized oracle network like Chainlink,” stated Fanti. “The Chainlink Research team is at the cutting edge of blockchain oracle technologies and MEV research, and I look forward to expanding upon the foundations they have built by researching how oracles communicating over imperfect networks can fairly order transactions in decentralized settings.”

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. Chainlink Community Grants are provided in Cash and/or LINK.