This summer, members of the Blockchain Technology Lab contributed to the Science of Blockchain Conference (SBC) 2025, an international forum on the latest research in blockchain science and engineering.
From the Lab, Aggelos Kiayias, Christina Ovezik, Yu Shen, and Lukas Aumayr were each involved in the programme, presenting and contributing to work spanning decentralisation, consensus, and protocol innovation.
- Christina Ovezik (PhD student, University of Edinburgh) presented joint work on measuring blockchain decentralisation. She highlighted the methodological challenges of quantifying decentralisation across layers, introducing the Lab’s Edinburgh Decentralisation Index (EDI) as a structured, reproducible approach.
- Aggelos Kiayias (Professor, University of Edinburgh) gave a keynote on the evolution of consensus protocols, tracing progress from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, introducing concepts such as economic security, and reflecting on the trajectory of the Ouroboros family.
- Yu Shen (Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Edinburgh) presented his forthcoming Crypto 2025 paper on State Machine Replication Among Strangers, a new protocol design improving settlement speed, fairness, and self-sufficiency in permissionless consensus.
- Lukas Aumayr (Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Edinburgh) was a co-author on the BitVM paper (presented by Robin Linus), which proposes a novel way to enable Bitcoin smart contracts and bridges using optimistic verification under Bitcoin’s scripting constraints.
Together, these contributions underline the Lab’s wide-ranging role in blockchain research – from metrics and measurement, to theory and protocol design, through to applied innovation on Bitcoin and beyond.
