About TUM ACE-SUPPRA
ACE-SUPPRA was an interdisciplinary initiative, involving teams of different TUM departments with the following Co-PIs:
Prof. Andreas Herkersdorf – Chair of Integrated Systems (LIS) Prof. Florian Matthes – Chair of Software Engineering for Business Information Systems (SEBIS) Prof. Alexander Pretschner – Chair of Software and Systems Engineering (SSE) Prof. Isabell Welpe – Chair of Strategy and Organization (SAO)
Research of the involved groups, building on their key competencies, addresses technical, economic, and social aspects of blockchain technologies in relation to the Algorand protocol. The chair of Prof. Carle targets assessment of the Algorand infrastructure, aiming for the improvement of its performance, and research of more secure and privacy-preserving techniques for the Algorand users. Prof. Herkersdorf and his team address performance enhancements using SmartNICs to which certain operations can be offloaded. Smart contract capabilities are a key factor to blockchain adoption and usability, which will be investigated by the research group of Prof. Pretschner, aiming to improve robustness, quality, and security. Focusing on secure usability, Prof. Matthes aims to offer solutions to minimize risks and overhead caused by smart contract development. The team of Prof. Welpe addresses aspects of tokenomics and governance of Algorand. ACE-SUPPRA outreach activities include the organization of workshops and hackathons.
Motivation
In an increasingly interconnected world with mutually distrustful or partially distrustful stakeholders, implementation of robust and high-performance transaction and smart contract systems has grown in importance. This is demonstrated by the significant rise in interest towards both permissionless and permissioned Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and blockchain-based systems in recent years. With its Proof-of-Stake (PoS)-based design and powerful smart contract language, Algorand is a promising platform to realize future systems upon. Security, Usability, Performance, and Privacy Research in Algorand (ACE-SUPPRA) is a concentrated effort of the Blockchain Research Cluster of TUM. In ACE-SUPPRA, the Chair of Network Architectures and Services (NET) plans to evaluate the underlying infrastructure and enhance its performance and capabilities, the Chair of Integrated Systems (LIS) will research potential performance improvements through hardware offloading and smartNICs, the Chair for Software Engineering for Business Information Systems (SEBIS) will enhance the usability of the Algorand blockchain, and the Chair for Software and Systems Engineering (SSE) will investigate the capabilities of Algorand smart contracts and their secure design, the Chair for Strategy and Organization (SAO) evaluates tokenomics, governance models, and DAO implementation in Algorand and supports their extension. Figure below provides an overview of the main areas of research and the core contributions of each research group. Besides scientific contributions, ACE-SUPPRA aims to improve the Algorand ecosystem, foster scientific exchange between academia and the Algorand foundation, and rejuvenate teaching operation for future generations of students, leveraging the discovered findings.
