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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. 

Latest open-source research

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.

Chainmail

An open-source smart contract and web app for verifying signed emails on the blockchain to protect against phishing. Chainmail serves as a public key infrastructure (PKI) to connect email addresses, PGP keys, and blockchain addresses. Users can verify email messages directly on-chain.

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R-Pool and Settlement Markets for Recoverable Wrapper Tokens

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

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Recoverable Wrapper Tokens

Lack of recoverability remains a large barrier to mainstream adoption of blockchain technologies 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.

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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.

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Perimeter Protocol

Perimeter Protocol is 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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Economic Research

Looking for more research from Circle? Check out our latest economics research on macroeconomics, stablecoins, digital assets, distributed ledger technology (DLT) and blockchains.

Have a question or Interested in a research collaboration? Please reach out to
circle-research@circle.com.

Resources for Developers

Looking for more open-source guides from Circle? Check out our developer documentation for how to create the next revolutionary app powered by digital currency and secure Web3 wallets.

Web3 Services
Circle APIs (Liquidity)
Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol
Verite

FAQ

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 engineers and product managers, projects published by Circle Research are committed to public good and open-source contributions to push the boundaries of technology used in crypto, blockchain, and Web3.

Circle Research will not publish market analysis, market commentary, or insights into price movements for digital assets.

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

Yes. Most contributions from Circle Research will include initial code in our GitHub repository. Anyone can access this initial code and fork it for their application and use. We will also strive to provide developer documentation to assist in using new research, protocols, and code. 

A few times a year. Given the time and resources required to create detailed research with initial code, and the limits of a small team, we will aim to publish open-source research contributions a few times a year. 

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