Academic Research Grants

• Decentralized global consensus without mining, including improvements to or analysis of the Stellar Consensus Protocol
• Incentive design for improving financial responsibility, civic engagement, or other behaviors promoting financial security and democracy
• Byzantine fault tolerant, Sybil-resistant, open peer-to-peer multicast, particularly solutions leveraging quorum slices
• Adaptations of traditional market mechanisms (such as short selling and derivatives) to Stellar or other distributed ledgers
• Scalability improvements, including techniques for deterministically parallelizing transactions on order books or extending on-chain order books to work with off-chain payment channels
• 2-way pegged side chains across ledgers employing quorum slices
• Privacy, including improvements to both efficiency and regulatory compliance of private payments
• Empirical studies of the Stellar network or lumen distribution Programs
• Legal theories and implications surrounding usage of distributed ledgers or decentralized exchanges for physical property and securities
• Studies on governance of distributed systems
• Smart contracts languages that enable safe development of fin-tech applications. Safety by construction, amenability to static analysis, and runtime performance on large ledgers are of particular interest.

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The foundation hopes to see results incorporated into open-source financial technology, and thus wants to avoid supporting research that leads to patented technologies.