Building the technical foundations of web3

Consensys Research address the questions shaping the Ethereum of tomorrow and tackle the challenges limiting its ecosystem today

OUR RESEARCH PHILOSOPHY

Our teams seek out and solve Ethereum’s most pressing challenges, collaborating with the community and sharing our research to advance and accelerate the adoption of decentralized technologies.

Our researchers regularly publish in academic journals, release and maintain open source projects, and apply research to Consensys products.

Research Areas

Our research areas spans all key topics to enable the success of distributed technologies

Distributed Protocol Formal Verification
Distributed Protocol Formal Verification

The Ethereum protocol and its applications rely on critical Byzantine-fault-tolerant distributed protocols. This research area focuses on proving the correctness of such protocols. Our work includes writing (with the Ethereum Foundation) an unambiguous formal specification and providing computer-assisted proofs that the specification satisfies a set of desired properties.

Trustworthy Smart Contracts
Trustworthy Smart Contracts

A defining characteristic of the Ethereum blockchain is that it is programmable, but implementing complex business logic as code requires a high degree of trust in the code. This research centers on the design and application of machine-assisted logical reasoning techniques to formalize the smart contract specifications and ensure they implement the correct logic.

Ethereum Protocol
Ethereum Protocol

Contribute to Ethereum’s decentralized R&D with a focus on the Merge, mainnet client development, maintenance and interoperability, sharing and networking research as well as analysis of existing protocol design and the proposal of new EIPs and API designs.

Scalability and Rollups
Scalability and Rollups

Scaling Ethereum allows to support more applications at a lower cost. We have the target of increasing the practical capacity by several orders of magnitude at a reasonable hardware cost. Our research is currently centered rollups and zk-EVM with fast and auditable provers.

Cryptography
Cryptography

Cryptography is at the heart of blockchain and this research currently centers on zero-knowledge proofs that will enable greater scalability, privacy, core protocol upgrades and light clients. The team develops open source tools for applying advanced cryptography, including a library used for zk-rollups and zk-EVM.

Crosschain and Bridges
Crosschain and Bridges

The success of web3 requires seamless communication across chains and rollups. Current implementations and protocols come with different trade-offs and operational risks. This research centers on new primitives, mechanisms and protocols to enable secure, efficient and decentralized crosschain architectures.

Publications

Consensys R&D publish multiple papers and technical reports every year. Below is a full list of our research.

Team and Opportunities

Consensys research tackles tough problems together. Join us in building the future of Ethereum and web3!