Circle Research

Empowering crypto innovation through open-source R&D

Circle Research is committed to open-source principles, making our leading research accessible to the global community. We aim to contribute to the public good and accelerate crypto, blockchain, and Web3 innovation. 

Research contributions

With focus areas like cryptography, cryptocurrency standards, zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology, and smart contract development, Circle Research develops insights and reference materials at the cutting edge of our industry.

Latest research

Exploring Confirmation Rules for Ethereum

Examining recent research into confirmation rules for Ethereum to balance the needs of faster settlement with security for certain applications. This analysis derives insights from "A Fast Confirmation Rule for the Ethereum Consensus Protocol," a paper co-authored by researchers at Offchain Labs, the Ethereum Foundation, Consensys, and the University of Canterbury.

R-Pool and Settlement Markets for Recoverable Wrapper Tokens

In conjunction with Stanford researchers, Circle Research introduces the concept of “R-Pools”, which serve as decentralized insurance for DeFi protocols by facilitating exchanges between unsettled recoverable wrapper tokens for base tokens. This work discusses two designs of such a mechanism: AMM and order book.

Resources

Recoverable Wrapper Tokens

Lack of recoverability remains a large barrier to mainstream adoption of blockchain technology from a UX, regulatory, and security perspective. The recoverable wrapper token (RWT) is a configurable mechanism to protect any ERC-20 token from thefts, hacks, and accidental transactions.

Resources

Robust Threshold ECDSA Signatures

Identifying misbehaving participants in a multi-party computation is better done sooner than later. Our new protocol shows how to modify the CGG+21 threshold signature scheme to identify misbehaving signers in real time.

Resources

Perimeter Protocol

A new standard for credit creation on the internet. Perimeter Protocol is a set of smart contracts built on open standards to enable the seamless exchange of capital on secure, open, and permissionless networks.

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FAQs

Circle Research has a charter to accelerate and amplify technical innovation within the crypto industry by developing technical, open-source research with direct applications. Led by a small team of Circle researchers, engineers, and product managers, projects published by Circle Research are committed to public good and open-source contributions to push the boundaries of crypto and blockchain technology.

Yes. Content published by Circle Research is free and available for anyone to consume, use, and build upon.

Yes. Most contributions from Circle Research will include code in our GitHub repository. Anyone can access this open-source code and fork it for their application and use.

We will aim to publish open-source research contributions with code a few times a year. 

Economic Research

Check out our Policy Hub for our latest papers on macroeconomics, stablecoins, digital assets, distributed ledger technology (DLT) and blockchains.