Experience and Key Insights from ICBC 24

Suhyeon Lee
Tokamak Network
Published in
5 min readJun 12, 2024

Participation, Observation, and Reflection at ICBC 24

** Korean version of this article is here

Trinity College Dublin

In the last week of May, I attended the 6th International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC) 24, held at the Trinity College Dublin in Ireland.

* This article is intended to provide information and tips for students, early stage researchers, and those seeking to bridge the gap between the cryptocurrency industry and academia.

Having attended the first ICBC in Seoul in 2019 when I was a researcher at Agency for Defense Development (ADD), attending this conference again held a special meaning for me. Since that first conference, I have continued to read interesting papers from the conference, and this year, I could see the quantitative and qualitative growth of ICBC. Many leading research groups presented, and there were various workshops on topics such as Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) and crypto exchanges, showing the diversity in the blockchain field. According to the official statistics presented at the conference, the acceptance ratio for full papers in the main session was quite low at 18.8% (34/181). This indicates how competitively quantitative the conference is. Also, I want to infrom this figure alone does not fully represent the qualitative aspect of the conference.

Poster session (left) Main session (right)

In the conference, particularly, the sessions sponsored by the Cardano Foundation were impressive. I was vaguely aware of the foundation’s efforts towards decentralization, but through the keynotes and research presentations conducted by foundation officials at Cardano, I could closely observe their efforts and philosophy. Sebastian Bode, the Technical Director of Cardano, shared his thoughts on the commonalities and differences between research and engineering while driving the project forward, drew empathy and insight from many researchers and industry professionals.

I participated in this conference as the second author of the main session paper “A Tip for IOTA Privacy: IOTA Light Node Deanonymization via Tip Selection” [1]. This paper discusses the likelihood of an attacker using information queried from nodes operating IOTA light nodes to select tips, potentially exposing users’ privacy information. Simulations based on various environments and real node distribution dataset confirmed the fair possibility of a successful attack. However, the node distribution dataset used here is based on data from a few years ago, so we are preparing further research by checking more current node distribution data to analyze the validity of the attack more rigorously. Also, I had the good fortune of serving as a session chair for a session I was interested in, which was a great experience in serving the community.

Participation as a session chair

Many interesting presentations were given, but personally, papers related to Stablecoin, Rollup, and Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) caught my attention.

Yujin Potter presented her research on Stablecoin [2] focused on the Terra (Luna) situation, analyzing game-theoretically what conditions break pegging. Financially fully-backed stablecoins like USDT and USDC always maintain pegging in all scenarios as a Nash equilibrium. However, it shows that many financial states either have multiple Nash equilibria including the depegging situation or only have the depegging Nash equilibrium. It also compares how stably or unstably the price of stablecoins has been maintained over a year with theoretical analysis.

The presentation on Rollup by Yan Gorzny dealt with SoK [3] on compression algorithms used in Rollup. One of the biggest costs in operating a Rollup is the expense of uploading data from a subchain to a main chain in batch form. This cost has been significantly refined in the recent Ethereum Dancun update. The research showed that the compression algorithm ztsd used in OP Stack has the best compression performance in various scenarios. Furthermore, the presenter emphasized that using more zerobyte, which is much cheaper than non-zerobyte in the EVM cost structure, is important for further optimizing Rollup costs in the future.

Shashank Motepalli’s research on VDF [4] presented a new approach to decentralizing membership in permissioned blockchains. By using a delay tower, each node independently proves its identity through VDF, maintaining network security and ensuring fair participation without centralized membership service providers. VDF evaluataions fundamentally cannot be easily parallelized or require excessive power consumption, making them a relatively fair resource for competition compared to challenges like PoW or PoS. I believe this study shows an interesting example VDF applciation, which is relevant to my current research focus.

Through conversations with the authors of these papers, I not only considered new research directions but also gained more confidence in the direction of my research. Unexpected encounters and discussions not only about research but also personal experiences were some of the greatest values provided by attending the conference. While many things seem possible remotely in the era of normalized remote work post-COVID, I believe there are certainly aspects that are not. Participating in conferences and meeting people in person enables discussions on unexpected topics and plays an important role in discovering new ideas.

While I recommend other excellent conferences related to crypto such as Financial Cryptography (FC) and Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT), ICBC also provides a decent platform for networking and exchange, and I highly encourage participation if given the opportunity. Such experiences contribute significantly not only to research but also to personal professional growth. The efforts by the committee to grow and develop the conference are particularly motivating for future participation in ICBC.

** This article is written with the support of the Tokamak Network Foundation’s Small Grant.

[1] Yang et al. “A Tip for IOTA Privacy: IOTA Light Node Deanonymization via Tip Selection,” 2024 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC), Dublin, Ireland, 2024.

[2] Potter et al. “What Drives the (In) stability of a Stablecoin?,” 2024 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC), Dublin, Ireland, 2024.

[3] Palakkal et al. “SoK: Compression in Rollups,” 2024 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC), Dublin, Ireland, 2024.

[4] Shashank Motepalli and Hans-Arno Jacobsen. “Decentralizing permissioned blockchain with delay towers,” 2024 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC), Dublin, Ireland, 2024.

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