October 6, 2021
The Ethereum Foundation, the company that promotes and manages Ethereum, has awarded a research gift to Charalampos Papamanthou, to develop new types of Merkle trees that possess homomorphic properties and allow for aggregation of proofs. Merkle trees are fundamental data structures that are used all the way from secure storage to managing state in cryptocurrencies. Together with his student Weijie Wang at the Yale Applied Cryptography Laboratory, Papamanthou also plans to focus on alternative implementations based on lattice-based cryptography that will provide post-quantum security.