Cryptography Research Platforms

Extropy publishes original blockchain research through its Medium publication and Extropy Academy, covering topics including cross-chain MEV market structure, quantum cryptography threats to Ethereum, and EIP protocol analyses. A notable 2024 to 2025 study examined arbitrage and MEV markets across Ethereum, Solana, Optimism and Base, and StarkNet, producing detailed findings on how power-law concentration, per-trade economics, and infrastructure costs differ across ecosystems. The firm also produces a weekly Extropy Security Bytes digest documenting significant security incidents across Web3. The firm's research capabilities are reinforced by a team with backgrounds in cryptography, formal verification, and embedded systems, and by its Oxford base near academic research in these fields. Extropy's consulting services include zero-knowledge system design, domain-specific language research, and protocol-level security reviews. This combination of published analysis and applied research positions Extropy as an independent research voice covering both theoretical cryptographic advances and the applied security challenges facing live blockchain protocols.

Walrus is built around RedStuff, a proprietary two-dimensional erasure coding scheme developed by Mysten Labs that encodes stored blobs into slivers distributed across independent storage nodes. The system achieves Byzantine fault tolerance guarantees, ensuring full data recovery even when two-thirds of storage nodes go offline or act maliciously, while requiring only 4–5× data replication overhead. All data stored on Walrus carries cryptographic proof of correctness, allowing anyone to independently verify data integrity without trusting the storage provider. A December 2025 technical paper on arXiv describes a hybrid Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) and MPC architecture where TEE nodes run inside the validator network to strengthen cryptographic security guarantees beyond what standard MPC provides, addressing the challenge of secure private key management without centralized control.

Darklake Labs grounded its Solana privacy infrastructure in academic cryptography, publishing foundational research on the IACR ePrint Archive (eprint.iacr.org/2025/1802). The paper covered the one-sided encoding mechanism underlying Zyga, security proofs under standard cryptographic assumptions, and Solana performance benchmarks. The team maintained research partnerships with two Brazilian universities and held a patent application in process. The company combined zero-knowledge proofs with multi-party computation to achieve 99.9% MEV resistance in its dark pool mechanism, with no added latency. Tiago Alves, an active university professor, led the research program as Head of ZK Research. Darklake placed second in the Solana Radar Global Hackathon DeFi track and entered the Colosseum Accelerator before being acquired by SOL Strategies in April 2026.