Jointly organized by TU Wien Informatics, Princeton University and SBA Research, this educational outreach event was organized as a mixture of in-depth lectures and hands-on experience with two hackathons. Presenting high-profile lecturers coming from academia and industry, the first edition of the summer school provided the 85 student, academic, and industry attendees with an opportunity to learn about cutting-edge topics on blockchains and other distributed ledger technologies. By bringing together academic researchers and experts from industry, the participants’ understanding of the security and privacy specific requirements and guarantees was fostered.

Focus on High-Impact Research

Focusing on published and current high-impact research projects, topics like novel attacks on distributed systems, consensus protocols and fault tolerance, incentive structures, recent results on blockchain scalability, payment channels and state channels, advancements on smart contracts and realistic adversarial capabilities could be analyzed in detail.

Thanks to the generous support of our sponsors Liquidity Network, Nimiq, Research Institute, Bitpanda, NuCypher, Bolt Labs, the Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms, and the City of Vienna, participants were able to network with experts from academia and industry, sponsors, and among each other.

Hype or Digital-Social Revolution? Academic and Industry Perspectives

Moderated by Matteo Maffei from TU Wien Informatics, the summer school’s closing panel with Patrick McCorry from King’s College and PISA Research, Jing Chen from Stony Brook University and Algorand, and Krzysztof Pietrzak from IST Austria opened the opportunity of discussing the future of blockchain technologies. It highlighted the technologies’ disruptive potential, from giving control over citizens’ money back to them, to reducing the processing costs of financial transactions, to enabling a worldwide trustworthy distributed computing platform. It also discussed the grand challenges of blockchain technologies, in particular emphasizing the need of interdisciplinary research for bridging cryptography and economy, and the need to address scalability and sustainability.

Download the speaker’s presentation slides from the DBLT School’s website.

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