We’ve all heard of Wi-Fi. It’s everywhere from the library to the airport, restaurants and more. But less well-known is DeFi, decentralized financial networks. A National Science Foundation grant is funding research at New Mexico State University to make these decentralized essential networks more secure.

Roopa Vishwanathan, NMSU associate computer science professor, is working on new ways to help create secure decentralized financial networks. Using these networks and the techniques that the project proposes to develop, users can maintain their anonymity as well while participating in secure financial transactions. It’s the culmination of work she and a group of students and collaborators have been doing over the last five years. A $600,000 NSF grant awarded in October will fund her research for the next three years.

“This is basically a project about scaling blockchains in a secure way,” Vishwanathan said. “It’s specifically about a mechanism called a ‘payment channel network’ that is a well-regarded and popular way of scaling blockchains.”