Sui Funds University Researchers Exploring AI, an Energy Market, and Hybrid Blockchain Games

The Sui Foundation is pleased to announce the recipients for the first round of Sui Academic Research Awards (SARAs). The SARAs program delivers grants to fund research that advances Sui blockchain technology. The academic and research community responded to our initial call with a large number of high-quality proposals.

The nine accepted proposals cover a variety of topics such as tokenomics, mechanisms for smart contracts, and hybrid blockchain games. Grants totaling USD $225,000 were awarded to researchers distributed across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Greece, and Denmark.

Overview of Accepted Proposals

Project: Hybrid Blockchain Games

Research team: Ari Juels

Institution: Cornell Tech

Proposal overview: Blockchain technology is built around transparency and verifiable systems. However, current blockchain games rely on opaque centralized systems to facilitate action-oriented gameplay engines. This research explores extending blockchain technology's trust features further into games that bridge on- and off-chain systems.

Project: Solidity Mover: Solidity to Sui Smart Contract Transpilation

Research team: Rabimba Karanjai  and Weidong (Larry) Shi

Institution: University of Houston

Proposal overview: The goal of this research involves developing artificial intelligence to automatically translate smart contracts across programming languages. The resulting Large Language Model (LLM) framework and tooling will translate existing Solidity contracts to Move-based Sui contracts. This project will explore the more generalized problem of reliable and correct program transpilation between Solidity and Move, two low-resource languages without prior training of human developers. 

Project: SUI Volatility Modeling

Research team: George Giannopoulos

Institution: Department of Accounting, Finance, and Informatics, Kingston University, Kingston Business school

Proposal overview: This project will investigate the feasibility of a model that forecasts SUI's volatility. Using recent advances in econometrics, the research will attempt to predict SUI volatility as accurately as other mainstream assets.

Project: Cryptokurtosis

Research team: George Filis

Institution: Department of Economics, University of Patras

Proposal overview: This research will assess whether the daily risk metrics currently used by institutional investors to calculate their minimum capital requirements can adequately provide protection against financial stress. Specifically, the project considers whether higher trading frequency leads to higher potential losses.

Project: Differentially Private Mechanisms for Smart Contracts

Research team: James Hsin-yu Chiang

Institution: Cryptography and Security Department: Computer Science Institute at Aarhus University

Proposal overview: This research investigates using differential privacy (DP) to protect individuals interacting with privacy-preserving smart contracts. The project highlights the need for universal mechanisms applicable to smart contracts and blockchain technology.

Project: Enhancing Geospatial Diversity in Blockchains: A Step Towards True Decentralization

Research team: Hans-Arno Jacobsen

Institution: Middleware Systems Research Group (MSRG), University of Toronto

Proposal overview: This proposal addresses the challenge of enhancing decentralization through increasing geospatial diversity among Validators. Geo-spatial diversity among network Validators enhances robustness and fairness in blockchains, for example offering resilience against regional disasters.

Project: Securing the Foundation of Move

Research team: Meng Xu

Institution: University of Waterloo

Proposal overview: This project secures the foundation of the Move programming language, including both its conceptual semantics and toolchain implementation. 

Project: Spec2: Interactive Dual-level Specification Inference via Symbolic Summarization

Research team: Taesoo Kim

Institution: Systems Software and Security Lab at Georgia Tech

Proposal overview: This project constructs a holistic specification inference framework, Spec2, to automatically deduce a high-quality set of specifications, similar to what experts might develop manually. Although the general concept of specification inference is not new, practical tools are nonexistent in the smart contract domain, a gap for Spec2 to fill.

Project: An AMM-based Decentralized Exchange Market for Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading

Research team: Petr Musilek

Institution: Faculty of Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept, University of Alberta

Proposal overview: This research proposes a novel decentralized system for peer-to-peer energy trading on the Sui blockchain with automated market makers' mechanism and zero-knowledge proof technologies. 

We would like to thank all those who submitted proposals for the Sui Academic Research Awards program. Sui represents a new generation of blockchain technology and an excellent opportunity to explore its potential.

For those who are interested in the program, please submit your proposals for the next round by January 4, 2024.