Blockchain technology has revolutionized decentralized systems, enabling secure, transparent, and immutable data handling. However, scalability remains a significant challenge for its widespread adoption. This talk will begin with an overview of blockchain fundamentals, highlighting its strengths and limitations. We then delve into off-chain protocols—innovative solutions to address scalability issues. These include payment and state channels, commit chains, and rollups, which enable high transaction throughput by shifting operations off the main blockchain while preserving decentralization and security. Finally, we explore emerging research directions in off-chain protocol design, optimization, and integration, concluding with insights into their potential impact on the future of blockchain ecosystems.
Stefan Dziembowski is a professor at the University of Warsaw and a group leader at IDEAS NCBR. He is interested in theoretical and applied cryptography. He received an M.Sc. in computer science in 1996 from the University of Warsaw and a Ph.D. from the University of Aarhus, Denmark. He was a post-doc at the ETH Zurich, CNR Pisa, and the University of Rome, where he joined the faculty in 2008. In 2010, he moved to the University of Warsaw, leading the Cryptography and Blockchain Lab.
His papers appeared at leading computer science conferences and journals. He also served as a PC member of several international conferences, including CRYPTO and EUROCRYPT. He was the general chair of the Twelfth Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC’15) and a PC co-chair of TCC’18 and Eurocrypt 2022. He was also a keynote speaker at the Conference on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES) 2020. He was co-author of two papers that won the Best Paper Awards (at Eurocrypt 2014 and IEEE S&P 2014).
He received an ERC Advanced Grant, an ERC Starting Independent Researcher Grant, an FNP Welcome grant, an FNP Team grant, two NCN “Opus” grants, and a Marie-Curie Intra-European Fellowship (2006–2007). He also won the Polish-German “Copernicus” Award (in 2020, together with Prof. Sebastian Faust) and the Kazimierz Bartel Award (in 2016). He is a Polish National Science Centre Council member in the 2021–24 term. He promoted six doctorates.