What Can Cryptography Do For Decentralized Mechanism Design?

Zook link for remote participants

Abstract:  Due to the recent success of blockchain and other decentralized applications, there is an increasing demand for a solid framework to model and analyze incentives in such settings. This new area, decentralized mechanism design, aims to provide solutions that incentivize participants to follow honestly in decentralized applications.

In this talk, I will introduce this new area and overview several challenges in decentralized mechanism designs. With a specific example of Transaction Fee Mechanism (TFM), I will explain why decentralized mechanism design is fundamentally different from classical mechanism designs, and how I used cryptography to circumvent the previous impossibility results and build provable incentive-compatible TFM. In the end, I will discuss several exciting future directions along this line.

Bio: Ke Wu is a Ph.D. candidate at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Elaine Shi. Her research focused on combining cryptography and game theory to model incentives and design incentive-compatible mechanisms. Before joining CMU, she completed her MS in CS in 2017 at Johns Hopkins University, where she worked with Xin Li on coding theory. Prior to that, she graduated from Fudan University with a BA in Math in 2016.