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Blockchain at Lehigh University

Lehigh Blockchain

Students

Students actively involved in research and advanced development projects within Lehigh Blockchain:

  • Ph.D.. Students:
    • Syeda Ajbina Nusrat, PhD,’2x
  • Master’s Students:
    • Joss Duff, BS in CSB ’23, MS in CS’26
  • Undergraduate Students:
    • Josh Joseph, BS in CSB’26
    • Isabella Monstwillo,  BS in CSB’26
    • Daniel Novick,  BS in CSB’26
    • Max Nussbaum, BS in CS’27
    • William Scott, BS in CSB’26
    • Illia Slipchenko,  BS in CSB’26

Related Sites

  • Scalable Systems and Software Research Group
  • Center for Finanical Services Blockchain Lab
  • Institute for Data, Intelligent Systems, and Computation

Lehigh Blockchain News

  • [May 2025] Hank Korth moderated a Computing Research Association roundtable on "Blockchain in Industry" featuring a set of industry leaders who discussed the importance of blockchain in business and debated future directions. See details here and the recording here.
  • [April 2025] Lehigh Blockchain student Caleb Geren has been accorded an Honorable Mention in the 2025 U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) competition. Post-graduation, Caleb will be pursuing a Ph.D., working in cryptography at the University of Utah.
  • [February 2025] Lehigh Blockchain alumnus Joss Duff teamed with JimJim Valkema at the ETH Denver hackathon to with first prize in "ZK is the Endgame" category and another prize in the presentation round. (details here).
  • [February 2025] Lehigh Blockchain alumnus Maxim Vezenov presented a talk "The Noir Profiler" at Aztec Noircon 1 at the Aztec event at ETH Denver
  • [November 2024] Lehigh Blockchain alumnus Maxim Vezenov presented a talk and was a panelist at Aztec NoirCon 0 at Devcon 7. Details here.
  • [November 2024] Hank Korth presented on Digital Assets at the 6th Annual Lehigh Quant/Financial Engineering Conference. Details here.
  • [October 2024] Lehigh Blockchain alumnus Tal Derei is giving a presentation at zkSummit12 entitled "Accelerating Client-Side Cryptography with WebGPU".
  • [September 2024] Hank Korth participated in the Computing Research Association's Congressional Visit Day, visiting the DC offices of Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN), Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), and Rep. Susan Wild (D-PA)
  • [August 2024] Lehigh Blockchain sponsored 3 projects as part of Lehigh's Mountaintop Summer Experience Program. Students presented their work at the Lehigh Summer Research Expo: (1) Zero-Knowledge Proof Acceleration for Blockchain Applications (Mike Kaufman) (2) Blockchain Benchmarking (Nate Cable, Nick Carnevale, David Cueva) (3 )Global CBDC Hierarchical Stellar Consensus Protocol (Michael Goldfarb, Emir Veziroglu)
  • [May 2024] Lehigh Blockchain alumnus Tal Derei was recognition in the ZPrize Winner Announcement for "Best WebGPU solution". The work was joint with Wei Jie Koh of Geometry Research.
  • [April 2024] A poster entitled "Global CBDC Consensus: Hierarchical Stellar Consensus Protocol" was presented at the Lehigh I-DISC Faculty Forum
  • [March 2024] A poster entitled "OCToPus: Semantic-aware Concurrency Control for Blockchain Transactions" was presented at the ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming.
  • [February 2024] Lehigh Blockchain alumnus and ongoing collaborator Tal Derei is presenting at a workshop associated with ETH Denver with Koh Wei Jie (Geometry Research), "Accelerating client-side cryptography with WebGPU"
  • [January 2024] We appreciate the support of the Sui Foundation Academic Research Program.
  • [January 2024] The 2024 Lehigh CS/CSB capstone projects launched, including 4 blockchain-related projects, all continuing from last year: 2 with Oracle (one on CBDCs and one on Digital Identity), and 1 each with ChainBytes (Cafe' Justo), and Macguyver Tech (Smart Contract Security).
  • [January 2024] Hank Korth gave a talk at UC Irvine and met with blockchain and database researchers there.
  • [November 2023] Hank Korth presented on CBDCs at the 5th Annual Lehigh Quant/Financial Engineering Conference. Details here.
  • [October 2023] Patrick Zoro, Program Manager for Lehigh's Masters in Financial Engineering published an interview with Omid Malekan of Columbia University. Prof. Malekan, author of two books on blockchain, and regular guest presenter at Lehgih Blockchain courses and events.
  • [August 2023] A student from Lehigh CSE's NSF-sponsored Research Experience for Undergraduates program participated in summer research with Lehigh Blockchain as did 6 Lehigh students as part of Mountaintop Summer Experience program sponsored by Lehigh's Office of Creative Inquiry. All of these students are continuing their research in the 23-24 academic year.
  • [June 2023] The Workshop on Verifiable Database Systems, being held in conjunction with the ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference in Bellevue, WA, includes 2 Lehigh Blockchain papers: "Scaling Zero Knowledge to Verifiable Databases", and "Blockchain Benchmarking Standardized Framework". The latter paper is joint with the National University of Singapore
  • [May 2023] Tal Derei completed his MS in CS with a thesis entitled "Accelerating the PlonK zkSNARK Proving System using GPU Architectures". Tal is a 2022 graduate of the Lehigh Computer Science program
  • [May 2023] Jefferson Van Buskirk completed his MS in CS with a thesis entitled "The Standardization of Blockchain Benchmarking". Jef is a 2023 graduate of the Lehigh-unique Computer Science and Business program
  • [April 2023] Dele Atanda of metame presented a seminar entitled Trustless Information and the Trust Economy.
  • [April 2023] Omid Malekan of Columbia Business School presented a seminar entitled How Crypto Can (counterintuitively) Reduce Financial Risk.
  • [April 2023] Hank Korth accepted an invitation to join the Computing Research Association Industry (CRA-I) Council
  • [March 2023] We appreciate the support of the Oracle for Research Program in continuing their prior support for our research on "Enhancing Blockchain Performance via Highly Parallel Zero-Knowledge Proof Generation"
  • [March 2023] The Computing Research Association's Computing Community Consortium submitted a response to the U.S. Federal Government's request for information on "Digital Assets Research and Development". The response was co-authored by Hank Korth.
  • [February 2023] Lehigh Blockchain gratefully acknowledges a gift from Lehigh alumnus Charles Allen'99, CEO and Chairman of the Board, BTCS, Inc.
  • [January 2023] The Lehigh CS/CSB capstone project for 2023 includes 4 blockchain projects with ChainBytes, MacNerd, and Oracle (2 projects).
  • [December 2022] The three 2022 Lehigh CS/CSB program capstone projects pertaining to blockchain gave excellent final presentations and presented posters in the CSE Capstone Fair. The Cafe' Justo project won the Judge's Award for Best Overall Project. Links to the posters are in the Pubs, Presentations, Media tab.
  • [November 2022] We appreciate the support of Google for our proposal "Highly Parallel Zero-Knowledge Proof Generation Using Modern Architectures".
  • [November 2022] Cathie So of zkDAO@Harmony presented a seminar entitled ZKML: Towards Decentralized and Private Machine Learning on Blockchain.
  • [November 2022] Hank Korth presented a talk on Zero Knowledge at the 4th Annual Lehigh Quant/Financial Engineering Conference.
  • [November 2022] Hank Korth gave an invited talk at Bucknell University entitled Blockchain: Computer Science Foundations and Research Opportunities.
  • [November 2022 Matt Enslin'18 and Leo Danzig'20 of Circle presented a seminar talk entitled "Crypto in the Real World: Exploring the Utility of Digital Currency".
  • [October 2022] The undergraduate capstone project on blockchain-certified fair wages for coffee workers was presented by project sponsor Eric Grill of ChainBytes in the BlockchainLand conference in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon. The Lehigh students on this project are Kenny Cho, Joss Duff, Hudson Pavia, and Justin Venezia.
  • [October 2022] Lehigh Blockchain undergraduate Joss Duff published a tutorial on the Algorand Developer Portal covering the construction of a decentralized crowdfunding dapp using Reach.
  • [October 2022] Lehigh Blockchain master's student Tal Derei and alumnus Maxim Vezenov attended Devcon in Bogota. Maxim, now with Aztec, spoke on the Noir language.
  • [October 2022] Hank Korth presented (remotely) on blockchain to the Global Connect program at Incheon International High School
  • [October 2022] Hank Korth attended the HTPS workshop, visited the Lehigh Western Regional Office and Nasdaq Entrepreurial Center, visited our sponsors at Oracle led by Mark Rakhmilevich'83, and met with faculty at San Jose State, several potential Lehigh Blockchaih partners, and groups of alumni/ae.
  • [September, 2022] Lehigh Blockchain was featured by the Rossin College's Resolve Magazine. See the article here.
  • [September 15, 2022] The Lehigh Blockchain Club hosted an Ethereum Merge Party to increase community awareness of the impact of the ETH merge
  • [July 2022] Lehigh Blockchain was featured in a segment of a series on cryptocurrency presented by the Scranton, PA ABC affiliate, WNEP-TV
  • [June 2022] Hank Korth presented a Blockchain Technology Overview to the Broad Street Angels
  • [June 2022] Hank Korth along with students Tal Derei, Daniel Karkhut, and Leo Liu attended Consensus 2022 in Austin, TX. Hank also attended Algorand's AVM Austin 2022
  • [June 2022] We appreciate the support of the Oracle for Research Program for our proposal "Enhancing Blockchain Performance via Highly Parallel Zero-Knowledge Proof Generation"
  • [May 2022] Maxim Vezenov completed his MS in CS with a thesis entitled "Accelerating zkSNARKs on Modern Architectures". Maxim is a 2021 graduate of the Lehigh-unique Computer Science and Business program
  • [April 2022] We presented our work on accelerating ZK-proof generation on parallel architectures to Google. Congrats to our students Maxim Vezenov and dePaul Miller for an excellent job.
  • [April 2022} Lehigh Blockchain student Tal Derei is attending ETH Amsterdam and Devconnect Week with support from Zero-Knowledge University
  • We appreciate the support of the Stellar Foudation for our two proposals: "Decentralized Stellar Networks for Performant CBDCs" and "Deterministic Heterogeneous Transaction Processing for Blockchain"
  • We appreciate the gift from Steel Perlot in support of Lehigh Blockchain

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