MEGA-ACE

In 2022, as a sub-contractor for Purdue University as part of the MEGA-ACE team (“Multidisciplinary Educational Global Alliance for Algorand Center of Excellence”), Stealth is helping to provide solutions for our ambitious goals on the Algorand ACE program:

MEGA-ACE aims to transform the blockchain landscape. We are motivated by concrete problems, and aim to construct end-to-end solutions for them, starting from foundational theory and going all the way to applications. The problems require multidisciplinary approaches, since they involve issues in areas ranging from economics and social choice to cryptography to architecture. The mission of MEGA-ACE is to become a powerhouse for blockchain research, a forum for the exchange of ideas in the area, a center for training students in countries that currently do not provide such training, an enabler for the mobility for personnel (senior, junior, and students) within the MEGA-ACE network, and a success story of the ACE program having seeded a revolution in this space. MEGA-ACE by design will have a global footprint, which will enable it to focus on diversity and inclusion. Coordinated and led by Purdue, MEGA-ACE involves 9 countries in 5 continents. 28 senior investigators from 7 scientific areas, and dozens of graduate students and postdocs of every gender, color, race, and ethnicity; an ambitious interdisciplinary research agenda with blockchain problems, which only a team like ours can tackle; research-driven applications for end-to-end solutions in the Algorand ecosystem that address infrastructure problems in our partners’ local communities (Argentina, Greece, India, Kenya, Mexico); a teaching agenda aiming to touch millions of students in the whole globe with multi-lingual material; and over 30 collaborative events (workshops, schools, hackathons, blockchain days) that promise to seed blockchain research in all our partners’ institutes.

Specifically, Stealth’s tasks will include hosting several hackathons to contribute to Algorand’s open-source code base, as well as developing a prototype for a privacy-enhanced supply-chain monitoring system on top of the Algorand chain.  Stealth will also work with the rest of the MEGA-ACE team, which is led and coordinated by the Purdue Blockchain Lab, to support in the research, development, and education goals put forth in our collective proposal. The MEGA-ACE team includes partners from industry (Stealth and CoinFabrik) and top universities around the globe: Cornell, UCLA, Texas A&M, RPI, École Polytechnique, National Technical University of Athens, Bar-Ilan, Reichman, IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, University of Nairobi, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), University of Buenos Aires, and Australian National University.