Stanford University is officially hosting and sponsoring the event “Blockchain Protocol Analysis and Security Engineering 2017”. Its main objective will be to explore and understand systemic risk in distributed networks.

The conference, to be held on 26-27 January 2017, will feature various presentations and papers discussing “the use of formal methods, empirical analysis, and risk modelling” to evaluate the fundamental risks in blockchain networks, distributed systems and cryptography.

Stanford program committee including Bitcoin Core developer Peter Todd and Cornell University Professor Emin Gün Sirer will oversee and validate submitted materials. Accepted presentations and papers will be featured at the conference.

Although the committee expects submissions to explore cryptography involved in blockchain protocols, authors are required to take into account the presence of financial regulations and other international policies that may interfere with the implementation of blockchain networks.

“Submissions should be technical in nature, but including considerations of the legal, policy, and ethical implications of results is appreciated,” stated Stanford’s Cyber Initiative team.

Considering the rising trend of blockchain utilisation in the financial sector, the Stanford blockchain conference is expected to play an important role in setting the standards for blockchain protocols and distributed systems developed by banks and financial institutions internationally.

The systemic risks of distributed networks and cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have already been evaluated and successfully addressed over the past years due to the open source nature of these projects. In an open source community, anyone can view and propose changes to improve the resource’s security and efficiency.

However, private blockchain networks for banks and financial institutions are generally curated by a limited number of developers in centralised teams, which inevitably leaves them vulnerable to unexpected hacking attacks and security issues in the long run.

The Ethereum network, for instance, suffered from a series of security issues, bugs, and DDoS attacks since early September. The first solution that was implemented by the Ethereum development team did not succeed in mitigating the damage to the network done by a geth memory bug, which halved the network’s hash power.

For alternative blockchain startups and development teams, conferences and discussions focused on blockchain protocol analysis can help in building stronger and more robust blockchain infrastructures. Moreover, validation of the industry’s most respected and appreciated experts such as Peter Todd is likely to further enhance the security systems of blockchain protocols.

Joseph Young