The Stellar Development Foundation's research team published a 2024 recap highlighting their expansion to two full-time researchers, three peer-reviewed publications on distributed computing and consensus algorithms, five research talks at major conferences, and funding for 14 academic research groups globally.
In 2024, SDF's research team, established in 2023 to advance scientific problems aligned with equitable financial access, expanded significantly with the addition of cryptography researcher Iftach Haitner and support from part-time contractors and PhD interns. The team organized the 11th Workshop on Formal Reasoning in Distributed Algorithms (FRIDA 2024) and published three peer-reviewed papers on Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus and distributed computing at PODC 2024. Team members delivered five research talks at major venues including PODC, Dagstuhl Seminar, and TLA+ Community Meeting, while also serving on program committees for Eurocrypt 2024 and PODC 2024. SDF funded 14 academic research groups across multiple countries and developed python-fbas, a tool for verifying properties of Federated Byzantine Agreement Systems using SAT solvers.
