Credit networks are important financial constructs with applications spanning from clearing transactions between central banks to fostering informal credit exchanges among individuals and small businesses. These networks allow transitive transactions, where local trust can be leveraged to power expansive interactions that traverse the entire network diameter. Distinguished from the surge of cryptocurrencies, credit networks offer a unique proposition by enabling seamless transactions across conventional fiat currencies, cryptocurrencies, and user-defined currencies, all facilitated through IOU credit paths.
In the pursuit of decentralization, recent technical advances bring some new potential and viewpoints: blockchains and smart contracts provide the infrastructure to track credit, utilization, and digital asset interactions. Complementary advancements in routing strategies and channel maintenance, initially developed for other contexts as Bitcoin's Lightning network, are finding new purpose in the realm of credit networks. Additionally, the incorporation of privacy-enhancing technologies such as Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proofs, Multiparty computation, and Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) holds the potential to imbue credit networks with an unprecedented level of privacy.
This workshop aims at bringing academic and industrial participants together to discuss structures, security, and privacy for credit networks and foster future collaborations towards more inclusive and secure decentralized credit networks. The goal is to offer a platform to discuss the structural intricacies, security against Sybil attacks and node compromises, and privacy enhancements within credit networks.
Aniket Kate (https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/akate/)
Andrew Miller (https://soc1024.ece.illinois.edu/)
The workshop will consist of a few invited talks from academia and the industry, a panel, and contributed short talks.
We currently envision three sessions. We include those session details below. Please treat this listing as a work in progress.
We solicit submissions of talk abstracts on topics related to decentralized credit networks, including but not limited to:
For contributed talks, submissions should be extended abstracts (maximum 2 pages) in a format of the author’s choosing. Please send you submissions to the organizers by email on or before September 22nd. Early submission are welcome and the organizing team will review submission on an ongoing basis. We hope to finalize the program at the end of September. There will not be any workshop proceedings.
We are working towards making it convenient for everybody. More details soon.
Email:
Aniket Kate:
Andrew Miller: