Winner of inaugural CBER-Circle Insight Award announced

Circle, a global digital financial technology firm and the issuer of USDC and EUROC, and the Crypto and Blockchain Economics Research (CBER) Forum, a group of blockchain-focused faculty from leading universities, are proud to announce the winner of the first CBER-Circle Insight Award. This inaugural award, which includes a monetary recognition of 10,000 USDC, celebrates an exceptional scholarly paper that advances original, insightful approaches to addressing practical issues with blockchain technology.

The winner of the CBER-Circle Insight Prize is “Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering, and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges,” authored by Philip Daian, Steven Goldfeder, Tyler Kell, Yunqi Li, Xueyuan Zhao, Iddo Bentov, Lorenz Breidenbach, and Ari Juels. This paper highlighted a key issue that has since spurred a number of important on-going projects aimed at strengthening the core architecture of consensus mechanisms and smart contract developments that mitigate against adverse behaviors.

The paper was unanimously selected by the award selection committee, which included Joshua Gans (University of Toronto), Gordon Liao (Circle), Christine Parlour (University of California, Berkeley), Tim Roughgarden (Columbia University), and David Yermack (New York University).

“Groundbreaking research insights are the bedrock of tomorrow's innovations in finance and web3,” said Gordon Liao, Circle’s Chief Economist. “At Circle, we take pride in championing impactful research that shapes industry practices and policies, paving the way for transformative technological leap.”

The paper and its authors will be officially recognized at the third annual CBER Conference on May 5th 2023 at Columbia University.