The Science of Blockchain Conference (SBC) 2026

July 27-29, 2026 – Arrillaga Alumni Center @Stanford University, Stanford, CA

The 9th annual Science of Blockchain Conference (SBC) was hosted at Stanford University in collaboration with IC3 and the Stanford Center for Blockchain Research (CBR).

Tim Roughgarden, SBC Co-Chair, delivering opening remarks during SBC’26

Over 1,200 people registered to attend the conference that featured talks on technical subjects ranging from quantum threats and censorship resistance to zero-knowledge proofs and new consensus paradigms. SBC co-chairs Professor Dan Boneh and Tim Roughgarden delivered opening remarks, noting that a new era of blockchain adoption demands new theories and ideas.

Marwa Mouallem, PhD student at Technion, presenting during SBC’26

Here’s a list of IC3 research that was presented during SBC’26:

Escaping the Monopolist: An Economic Model of Censorship Resistance in Multi-Proposer Protocols – Presenter: Pranav Garimidi (a16z Crypto)
Timing Games in Responsive Consensus Protocols – Presenter: Kaya Alpturer (Princeton University, IC3)
The Economics of Proof-of-Useful-Work – Presenter: Rafael Pass (Pearl Research Labs, Cornell Tech, Technion, IC3)
zk-promises: Anonymous Moderation, Reputation, and Blocking from Anonymous Credentials with Callbacks – Presenter: Ian Miers (University of Maryland, IC3)
Arbigraph: Verifiable Turing-Complete Execution Delegation – Presenter: Michael Mirkin (Technion, IC3, Cadabra Systems)
Perils of Parallelism: Transaction Fee Mechanisms under Execution Uncertainty – Presenter: Sarisht Wadhwa (Duke University)
Persistent BitTorrent Trackers – Presenter: François-Xavier Wicht (University of Bern, IC3)
Resilient Alerting Protocols for Blockchains – Presenter: Marwa Mouallem (Technion, IC3)
B-Privacy: Defining and Enforcing Privacy in Weighted Voting – Presenter: Samuel Breckenridge (Cornell Tech, IC3)
Blockspace Under Pressure: An Analysis of Spam MEV on High-Throughput Blockchains – Presenter: Wenhao Wang (Yale University, IC3)
TxRay: Agentic Postmortem of Live Blockchain Attacks – Presenter: Arthur Gervais (University College London)
AetherWeave: Sybil-Resistant Robust Peer Discovery with Stake – Presenter: Kaya Alpturer (Princeton University, IC3)

Honorable Mention

Filip Rezabek, Co-founder & CTO of SpaceComputer—a 2025 IC3 accelerator project—presented Space Fabric: A Satellite-Enhanced Trusted Execution Architecture

Looking for more SBC content? Head to the official website.

Crypto x AI Dinner

IC3 dinner at Tamarine Restaurant in Palo Alto, CA

During SBC, IC3 hosted an invite-only dinner to celebrate our recent paper, Crypto x AI, AI x Crypto: A Survey—the work of over two dozen computer scientists, researchers, and industry practitioners.

Leaders in AI, crypto, and payments from OpenAI, Meta Superintelligence, Replit, Stellar Development Foundation, Solana Foundation, PayPal, The Linux Foundation, a16z crypto, and more joined to discuss the most promising research areas in this emerging sector with IC3 faculty and researchers.

We plan to host more curated research dinners throughout the year connecting academia and industry. Fill out this form to request an invite for upcoming dinners. Approved guests will be notified.

IC3 Evening Reception

On the second day of SBC, we hosted an evening reception at The Graduate for members and friends of IC3.

Held at the President’s Terrace, an iconic rooftop bar in Palo Alto, the event boasted breathtaking views of Stanford, the Santa Cruz Mountains, and a California sunset. This reception provided an opportunity for IC3 academic researchers, industry partners and invited guests to mingle and discuss the latest in blockchain research.

Thank you to everyone who attended and made the event a memorable one!