Project Guidelines for FTEC5640

To propose/ decide on the topic of your (individual) project, you are strongly encouraged to browse through a group of related papers which appeared in the following conferences/ research consortium in the past 5 years: ACM AFT (Advances in Financial Technologies), SBC (Science of Blockchain Conference), IC3 (The Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts), Blockchain/ Fintech/ DeFi security related papers in top-tier security conferences including IEEE Security & Privacy, ACM CCS, USENIX Security and NDSS, (especially SoK papers therein), as well as leading industrial/developer conferences such as DEVCON, EthCC, etc.

Project Requirements

For the topic of your choice, record a video presentation together with your presentation slides to provide a critical analysis and comparison of the different solution approaches you found (from the literature) for the topic. One suggestion is to start by giving an overview of the topic and identify the key problems related to the topic. You can then organize the list of papers you find and read for the topic and show how they address (are related to) these key problems.

You then proceed to discuss, for each (or a selected subset of) paper (or solution) you read, its key ideas/innovations, assumptions, analytical/algorithmic techniques, major results, their significance and potential level of impact with justifications. For example, why you think the findings of the paper is important and in what way can it help other researchers/practitioners to advance the field further.

Even better (but not required), you can propose possible extensions of the paper, e.g., by examining carefully the assumptions of the paper and discuss how the problem/ result will change if those assumptions change or get modified.

Once you have discussed the individual papers, your presentation should compare and contrast the results/findings across those papers and be able to give a status of the state-of-the-art in the area, and key challenges (i.e. new problems/ extensions) and opportunities waiting to be addressed.

Your presentation should not only discuss individual papers (solutions) as isolated objects but also show how those solutions compare with each other and/or how they complement each other. The ultimate goal is to provide a big picture on the state-of-the-art (industrial and/or research) landscape, available solutions and their competitive analysis associated with your topic. Original results will be a big plus but not required.

Deliverables and Grading [Action Required by May 15 EoD]

Each student should submit a recorded video presentation AT MOST 30 minutes long, together with the presentation slides (both PDF and source file). Your presentation should be performed by yourself - and the recording should show your face while delivering the talk instead of merely displaying the slides with background voice-over. The project will be graded according to its technical content (in terms of coverage, correctness, and soundness of the critical analysis/ competitive study), as well as the quality of presentation.

Note that according to the AI tools policy below,

If an AI tool is being used, the student should also submit the log showing the full interaction session(s) with AI (either in form of a file OR a public link to access such log).

The project deliverables submission deadline is May 15 (Friday) 11:59 pm.

Some Sample Project Topics

  1. “New” Gas Fee calculation schemes, e.g., EIP 1559 (and follow-ups) of Ethereum.
  2. Upcoming Technical Roadmap for the Ethereum blockchain, the problems to be addressed and possible solutions, e.g. Sharding support, Separation of Builders and Miners, Relay, etc
  3. Emerging attacks on Ethereum and their solutions, Long-Range attacks, Timing Attacks, Proposer Boost, etc.
  4. MEV (Maximum/Miner Extractable Value), Fair-ordering and related problems and solutions.
  5. Anatomy of high profile meltdown in the DeFi Market and lessons learned, including the collapse of IRON, Terra/Luna, stETH, sUSD, etc.
  6. Economic and Regulatory Policy research on Stablecoins (from different parts of the World).
  7. Evolution of Yield Farming Protocols: business models / technical solution of emerging market leaders .
  8. Evolution of Under-collateralized DeFi Lenders: business models / technical solution of emerging market leaders.
  9. Evolution of DeFi Leverage Brokers: business models / technical solution of emerging market leaders.
  10. Case study on recent Pivoting in the Business-model & Technical directions of major DeFi platforms and the underlying rationale, such as MakerDAO-to-Sky, Frax, Recovery Plan for Synthetix, etc.
  11. Prediction Markets in DeFi: Business models, Challenges and Solutions.
  12. Real World Asset (RWA) with DeFi: Business models, Challenges and Solutions.
  13. Incentive Misalignment Problem and Solution for DeFi Liquidity Providers, e.g., Bonding in Olympus ($OHM) Pro.
  14. The business/ technology landscape of DeFi Oracle service providers, e.g. Chainlink and other major market players.
  15. Recent developments in DeFi Legislation and Regulatory framework across the Globe, e.g. the U.S. Genius Act and HKSAR’s DeFi Laws and Regulatory Roadmap.
  16. Alternative Consensus mechanisms adopted by other Blockchains IN PRACTICE, e.g. the ones used by Algorand, Solana, Avalanche etc.
  17. Practical Privacy support in Blockchains
  18. Performance Scaling Solutions for Blockchains
  19. Fail-safe Self-custody Crypto Wallets with MPC (Multi-Party Computation)
  20. Cross-blockchain Interoperability: Emerging business opportunities, technical Solutions and commercial Landscape, deployment experience and success stories.

Project Proposal [Action Required by March 16 EoD]

The topics listed above are just examples. You should spend some time to perform preliminary research yourself and seek instructor’s approval for your own project topic by submitting a one-page project proposal (which should include (albeit partial) list of references/ papers) by the announced proposal deadline (March 16 11:59 PM).

This proposal is worth 20% of the total project score (which translates to 3% of the overall grade as the project is 15% of the overall grade.)

On the Use of AI Tools

Students are allowed to use AI tools in the preparation of the proposals/ and final project deliverable, but they will be held responsible for the comprehensive nature, correctness and quality of the technical content as well as the presentation/ delivery and will be graded accordingly.

If an AI tool is being used, the student should also submit the log showing the full interaction session(s) with AI (either in form of a file OR a public link to access such log).