iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

Yes! You've even seen _the_ structure on which it's based: viewing.nyc/media/d88b3d....

Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

A smashing Gotham-City style comic rendering of the first few chapters of THE ORACLE by illustrator Bill Bragg (billbragg.co.uk). Appearing in USECASE—a new high-gloss print (yes, print) magazine (www.usecase.xyz)—as an insert on comic book paper.

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

In 2017, I wouldn't have dreamed that Chainlink would be where it is today thanks to Sergey and Steve's foresight and leadership. I look forward to being amazed eight years from now.

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

10th Anniversary of the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts (IC3)! Celebration program here: www.initc3.org/events/2025-.... Cake below:

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

Article in The Block on Take My Ape (TMA). TMA lets you _own_ a Bored Ape for 15 minutes at the cost of a single Ethereum transaction. Give it a whirl here: takemyape.com. TMA is built to demo our Liquefaction system on Oasis Sapphire. www.theblock.co/post/357842/...

theblock.co

Cornell Tech debuts Liquefaction working use case to let users borrow tokens without ownership

The application, called Take My Ape, uses a process known as Liquefaction that allows users to take control of a Bored Ape NFT that they do not own for a limited period.

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Reposted by Ari Juels

Cornell Tech @cornelltech.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

#CornellTech Professor Ari Juels, alongside 10 other leading academics, has shared an open letter arguing that National Science Foundation (NSF) funding cuts threaten to devastate U.S. #crypto research. Read more in @coindesk.com: www.coindesk.com/opinion/2025... @arijuels.bsky.social #Research

coindesk.com

We Can’t Regulate Our Way to Crypto Leadership. We Still Need Science

National Science Foundation funding cuts threaten to devastate U.S. crypto research, say 10 leading professors.

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

In a parallel universe, there's no Bitcoin. No blockchain industry. Not even digital signatures to sign transactions. In that universe, U.S. science lacked the strong federal support it had here after WWII. We're headed that way now. Open letter from 9 U.S. colleagues and me: shorturl.at/TaYAI

coindesk.com

We Can’t Regulate Our Way to Crypto Leadership. We Still Need Science

National Science Foundation funding cuts threaten to devastate U.S. crypto research, say 10 leading professors.

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

Many thanks to Oasis Protocol for their support for TMA, which runs on Oasis Sapphire, and to IC3 for Bored Ape #8180, used in TMA.

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

Liquefaction has many other applications—but also key lessons about the future of wallets and digital asset ownership.

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

Take My Ape is out! Try it at takemyape.com. Own a Bored Ape for 15 minutes with one Ethereum transaction. Ownership ≠ rental. It means copyright license, access to BAYC spaces, and your address on chain as owner. TMA's goal? To demo the power of Liquefaction.

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Reposted by Ari Juels

Mor Naaman @informor.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

I have never seen anything like this in NYC. 5th Ave covered from 42nd St well to the 20s. Nobody prepared for this volume. Volunteers are holding the traffic on all the side streets. No police in sight. #handsoff

Full of people down 5th avenue, view from 39th Street.

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

Science of Blockchain Conference (SBC) deadline is ***tomorrow***, Thursday, 13 March. To learn more and submit, visit sbc-conference.com/2025/. Co-organized by BerkeleyRDI, CBRStanford, and IC3. I'm co-chairing with Dawn Song and Dan Boneh.

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

The Science of Blockchain Conference (SBC) submission deadline is less than a week away: Thursday, 13 March. To learn more and submit, visit sbc-conference.com/2025/. Co-organized by BerkeleyRDI, CBRStanford, and IC3. Co-chaired with Dawn Song and Dan Boneh.

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Reposted by Ari Juels

Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 03/03/2025

The wind map at hint.fm/wind/ has been running since 2012, relying on weather data from NOAA. We added a notice like this today. Thanks to @cambecc.bsky.social for the inspiration.

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

The Science of Blockchain Conference (SBC) submission deadline is in just over a month: 13 March. To learn more and submit, visit www.sbc-conference.com/2025/. Co-organized by Berkeley RDI, CBR Stanford, and IC3. Co-chaired with Dawn Song and Dan Boneh.

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

We've now publicly released code for Liquefaction: github.com/key-encumbra.... Liqufaction privately liqufies any blockchain asset, showing how TEEs are poised to transform the blockchain landscape. Impacts in the table below. Austgen et al. paper here: arxiv.org/pdf/2412.026....

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

Nice Bloomberg article on Liquefaction today by Olga Kharif. Clear and helpful overview of the technology and its far-reaching implications, bad and good, for web3. www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

bloomberg.com

Cornell Researchers Warn of New Way to Obfuscate Crypto Transactions

Olga Kharif dives into a new research paper that calls into question one of the crypto world’s oldest axioms.

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Reposted by Ari Juels

Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

I've been using OpenAI's o1 for some math, with dramatically mixed results. Some impressive hits, but also some wrong answers that were spookily confusing. Basic mistakes that took me weirdly long to spot—almost as if the system learned to make adversarial examples for humans.

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

The accelerator will offer a more systematic way to build on the IC3 research that has had far-reaching impact: covenants, drand, Dandelion++, DECO, Ekiden (Oasis Labs), GasToken, MEV, Selfish Mining, etc., etc, all bear IC3's imprint.

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

IC3 was created to bridge the gap between academia and the blockchain industry. Our alumns have had monumental success, founding, e.g., Ava Labs, Offchain Labs, and Flashbots. We're ramping up IC3 tech transfer with the IC3-Cornell Blockchain Accelerator.

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

We introduce Liquefaction, a wallet platform that can render essentially any blockchain asset into liquid form.

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

In a paper released today, we show how this assumption can be privately broken by Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), with sweeping consequences for the blockchain ecosystem—both good and bad.

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

Locked / unvested tokens. Airdrops. Soulbound Tokens. DAO voting. These crypto applications all have one thing in common… They assume critically that private keys are controlled by an individual. arxiv.org/abs/2412.02634

arxiv.org

Liquefaction: Privately Liquefying Blockchain Assets

Inherent in the world of cryptocurrency systems and their security models is the notion that private keys, and thus assets, are controlled by individuals or individual entities. We present Liquefact...

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Will a Crypto Bluesky emerge? I hope so, with a tilt more toward the tech than the casino. Some starting material: a 90-second video entitled "What is a blockchain?" www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpeA...

youtube.com

What is a blockchain?

YouTube video by Ari Juels

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

DYOR is a collaborative series between IC3 and The Defiant. An underappreciated feature of the blockchain industry is its deep academic roots. The most recent DYOR episode features three popular CEOs who are also scientists with outstanding academic credentials. www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6TB...

youtube.com

Get Off My L1! What Are L2s And Why Are They So Popular

YouTube video by IC3 Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

15:34 - Preventing malicious intents through oracle systems 18:21 - AI x crypto use cases 22:16 - DAOs 27:51 - Entropy in voting behaviours 32:04 - Dark DAOs 36:20 - TEEs & private smart contracts 49:55 - MEV & proofs of transaction ordering 59:30 - Future blockchain research

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

The Science of Blockchain 2025 website is now live! Visit www.sbc-conference.com/2025/. We're heading to Berkeley next year. Submission deadline: 13 March 2025

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Reposted by Ari Juels

Martin Wattenberg @wattenberg.bsky.social · 12/11/2024

Visualize infinite series! Here's a page I made a few years ago, letting you play with convergence and divergence. www.bewitched.com/demo/taylor/...

bewitched.com

Visual Taylor Series

Visualizations of Taylor Series, based on diagrams from Amie Wilkinson

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

Today there's no way to share your personal web data—e.g., health records, financial records, or e-mail—securely. But DECO makes it possible, with no modification to existing web servers. How? Well, cryptographic magic. Five years in the making, DECO is finally live: deco.chain.link/sandbox.

deco.chain.link

DECO Sandbox: Privacy-Preserving Data Verification | Chainlink

Discover how DECO enables provenance-enabled, privacy-preserving identity and financial data verification using zero-knowledge proofs.

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

Ask not what ML can do for blockchains; ask what blockchains can do for ML. Props: A new concept paper with Farinaz Koushanfar. arxiv.org/pdf/2410.205...

arxiv.org

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 13/11/2024

Sarah Allen (IC3, Flashbots) gave a DevCon talk discussing the havoc TEEs can wreak and how to prevent it using... TEEs. (Recent joint work) docs.google.com/presentation...

docs.google.com

Dark DAOs and Private Coordination

Dark DAOs and Private Coordination Sarah Allen Flashbots, IC3

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 29/10/2024

Ask not what ML can do for blockchains; ask what blockchains can do for ML. arxiv.org/pdf/2410.205...

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Reposted by Ari Juels

ePrint Updates @eprint.ing.bot · 07/08/2024

PROF: Protected Order Flow in a Profit-Seeking World (Kushal Babel, Nerla Jean-Louis, Yan Ji, Ujval Misra, Mahimna Kelkar, Kosala Yapa Mudiyanselage, Andrew Miller, Ari Juels) ia.cr/2024/1241

Abstract. Users of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications face significant risks from adversarial actions that manipulate the order of transactions to extract value from users. Such actions—an adversarial form of what is called maximal-extractable value (MEV)—impact both individual outcomes and the stability of the DeFi ecosystem. MEV exploitation, moreover, is being institutionalized through an architectural paradigm known Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS).

This work introduces a system called PROF (PRotected Order Flow) that is designed to limit harmful forms of MEV in existing PBS systems. PROF aims at this goal using two ideas. First, PROF imposes an ordering on a set (“bundle”) of privately input transactions and enforces that ordering all the way through to block production-preventing transaction-order manipulation. Second, PROF creates bundles whose inclusion is profitable to block producers, thereby ensuring that bundles see timely inclusion in blocks.

PROF is backward-compatible, meaning that it works with existing and future PBS designs. PROF is also compatible with any desired algorithm for ordering transactions within a PROF bundle (e.g., first-come, first-serve, fee-based, etc.). It executes efficiently, i.e., with low latency, and requires no additional trust assumptions among PBS entities. We quantitatively and qualitatively analyze PROF’s incentive structure, and its utility to users compared with existing solutions. We also report on inclusion likelihood of PROF transactions, and concrete latency numbers through our end-to-end implementation.

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 28/04/2024

My fireside chat with Sergey Nazarov about The Oracle. Sometimes a fireside chat is a just an interview. But in my conversation with Sergey, I felt the crackle and warmth of the (metaphorical) fireplace. Wonderful to have the Chainlink community there! www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNB5...

youtube.com

When AI and Blockchain Collide | Ari Juels and Sergey Nazarov

Chainlink Labs Chief Scientist Ari Juels' new sci-fi thriller The Oracle brings together themes from mythical antiquity, artificial intelligence, blockchain ...

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 24/02/2024

Blockworks just posted a nice writeup on THE ORACLE. "The Oracle is a cheerful thriller that masterfully mixes ancient Greek, art history, art theft and cryptography." #oraclenovel oraclenovel.com

blockworks.co

How a smart contract gets away with murder: A review of ‘The Oracle’

Opinion: If you’re looking to learn more about how a blockchain oracle could potentially kill you — this is the book for you.

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 13/02/2024

THE ORACLE event with Blockchain NYC rescheduled to Tuesday, 27 February. (Original event tomorrow snowed out.) Tickets available here: eventbrite.com/e/talk-book-.... See you there! Other book events: www.oraclenovel.com/events-1. #oraclenovel www.oraclenovel.com

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 10/12/2023

Without decentralization, a DAO is just an AO. But what does decentralization really mean for a DAO? New blog post: The ‘D’ in DAO? We’ve All Been Getting It Wrong. w/ J. Austgen, A. Fábrega, S. Allen, K. Babel, and M. Kelkar

initc3org.medium.com

The ‘D’ in DAO? We’ve All Been Getting It Wrong.

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 16/11/2023

DAOs are a truly interdisciplinary research topic, spanning political science, computer science, economics, law, and organizational science. Here's a fresh compendium of DAO research papers waiting to see the light of day: arxiv.org/abs/2310.19201. Also see daoscience.org.

arxiv.org

Open Problems in DAOs

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are a new, rapidly-growing class of organizations governed by smart contracts. Here we describe how researchers can contribute to the emerging science...

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 16/11/2023

A new MarketWatch op-ed with my Cornell colleague Eswar Prasad. In short, Bankman-Fried's grift wasn't about crypto / blockchains as a technology. In a sense, it was the opposite...

marketwatch.com

Crypto will overcome the stain of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried

Blockchain technology and proof of reserves will help to create transparency and build trust.

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 16/11/2023

Our new paper on DAOs at arxiv.org/abs/2311.03530 has two main findings: (1) Common ways to measure decentralization today leave DAOs flying blind. (2) Dark DAOs are practical and a realistic threat. Heavy lifting by James Austen, Andrés Fábrega, Sarah Allen, Kushal Babel, and Mahimna Kelkar.

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 04/11/2023

The Gulbenkian Museum has an astonishing collection of coins. Here's their Akragas Decadrachm—an entire frieze sized like a US silver dollar. Some ten are known to exist today. It shows Helios driving his chariot in the sky and scaring the bejesus out of an eagle carrying home dinner (a snake).

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 08/10/2023

THE ORACLE cover is complete (thanks to the wonderful designer at Talos Press known to me only as David!). And the website is up! oraclenovel.com Publication date: 20 Feb. 2024. Book events being planned. #OracleNovel

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 08/09/2023

Increasingly complex DeFi means increasingly complex MEV risks. Lanturn, led by Kushal Babel and Mojan Javaheripi, uses adaptive learning to get accurate MEV estimates w/o heuristics: eprint.iacr.org/2023/1338.pdf (+ Github code). It has even discovered two interesting new MEV-extraction strategies.

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Ari Juels @arijuels.bsky.social · 19/08/2023

Science of Blockchain Conference (SBC) 2023 happening in 10 days. Dozens of regular presentations and three excellent invited speakers: Dankrad Feist (EF), Dan Robinson (Paradigm), and Eli Ben-Sasson (StarkWare). View the program at: cbr.stanford.edu/sbc23.

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