Tesseract

When trading cryptocurrencies, users currently have to make a difficult choice between centralized and decentralized exchanges.

Centralized exchanges offer good performance, but give full control of any assets traded on the exchange to its operator, leaving users vulnerable to theft of funds and market manipulation if the operator is compromised or acts maliciously.

In contrast, decentralized exchanges are “trustless” (i.e. don’t require users to trust the operator) and offer better security, but offer limited functionality and poor performance characteristics. Today, simply put, users lack access to safe, performant exchanges.

Tesseract is the first cryptocurrency exchange design that offers the best of both worlds: we can offer users the performance of a centralized exchange without the risk of theft of funds by the operator of the exchange. It does so by taking advantage of trusted execution environments, permissioned decentralization, and atomic cross-chain settlements.

Research

Tesseract is based on research conducted at Cornell Tech and ETH Zürich. A preprint of the paper is external pageavailable onlinecall_made.

People

• external pageLorenz Breidenbachcall_made (ETH Zürich)
  
• external pageDr. Iddo Bentovcall_made (Cornell Tech)
• Prof. Srdjan Capkun (ETH Zürich)
  
• external pageProf. Ari Juelscall_made (Cornell Tech)