UCL Center for Blockchain Technologies, London has announced the call for submissions of student research thesis and research papers in areas of blockchain, bitcoin or other financial cryptography research, as a part of its Student Thesis/Paper Competition 2016.

According to the official release, the competition is a grass-roots independent academic effort in order to crowd-source blockchain security, risk,  and financial cryptography research for the community benefit that makes it better understand blockchain systems and their vulnerabilities.

“We seek [primarily] submissions from students which have already been graded by a university. Independent researchers and participants from start-ups are also welcome. However, blockchain professionals and well-funded professional researchers will not qualify for cash research prizes unless the jury decides otherwise,” the official release stated.

The competition provides research prizes of moderate size to researchers who are able to underline key security failures, risks, privacy and other critical issues in bitcoin and blockchain systems. The prizes will include 5 BTC for a study on criticalities, economic distortions and pathologies in the bitcoin and blockchain economy, 5 BTC for a study on risk security and vulnerabilities and 5 BTC for discovery of attacks bugs or flaws in ZK proofs, ring signatures, ECCs, key management in advanced cryptographic techniques related to blockchain.

The prize jury comprises of professors and experts in the field from various universities across the globe including Prof. Jan Aldert Bergstra, Institute of Informatics from the University of Amsterdam; Ass. Prof. Stefan Dziembowski from University of Warsaw, Poland; Dr. Aggelos Kiayias from University of Edinburgh, UK; Prof. David Naccache from Ecole Normale Supérieure and Ingenico Labs, France, among others.

The competition is organized by Dr. Nicolas Courtois from the Department of Computer Science at UCL. The deadline for all thesis submissions is on 15th October 2016.