Cornell Bowers College of Computing and Information Science
A color photo of a man sitting and smiling for a photo

Story

Aptos Labs awards Alvisi $50K grant

February 1, 2023

Aptos, the Layer 1 blockchain driving mainstream adoption into Web3 through unparalleled technology and user experience, has awarded a $50,000 grant to Lorenzo Alvisi, Tisch University Professor of Computer Science in Cornell Bowers CIS, to help support Web3 innovation in higher education. 

The $50K grant will fund student research in developing a novel approach to scale the performance of blockchains by building the abstraction of a secure, fault-tolerant, decentralized append-only log on top of a Byzantine-tolerant database. This new, client-centric architecture can support highly concurrent transaction processing and eliminates concerns about the fairness of leader-based blockchains.

“Blockchain education remains a key cornerstone of Aptos’ mission, as it is a core value across our engineering team, which is comprised of a variety of PhDs across high-performance computing and cryptography disciplines,” said Avery Ching CTO and co-founder of Aptos Labs “We are delighted to support the work of Professor Alvisi’s students as they not only research novel blockchain systems but also develop real-world, scalable use cases and applications to benefit the future of the industry.”

“This collaboration with Aptos will help our team understand how to allow existing blockchain-based applications to take full advantage of our novel architecture,” added Alvisi. “Aptos’ Block-STM, which is at the forefront of today’s scalable blockchain execution engines, is a beautiful example of bringing to blockchains the concurrency advantages offered by databases.”

Read more about the grant and Aptos Labs efforts in higher education in this CoinDesk story.