Fairness has always been a cornerstone of effective and equitable interactions, and this principle is increasingly crucial in decentralized and distributed systems. The evolving challenges in ensuring fairness within these systems are multifaceted. They include scalability issues, where maintaining fairness becomes complex as systems grow; the integration of fairness with security and privacy, ensuring that fairness mechanisms do not compromise data confidentiality; real-time and adaptive fairness, requiring solutions that can handle dynamic environments; and managing multiple notions of fairness within a single system. Additionally, critical concerns are addressing vulnerabilities related to centralized trust, designing fair incentive structures, and translating theoretical concepts into practical, deployable solutions. Interdisciplinary integration across cryptography, game theory, finance, and distributed systems also presents ongoing challenges.

The workshop on Recent Advances in Fairness in Distributed Applications is dedicated to exploring these critical challenges with a focus on decentralized systems like blockchains and other distributed applications along the following dimensions:

• Rational Cryptography
• Fairness in Multi-party Computation
• Distributed Key Generation
• Timed Cryptography
• Threshold Cryptography
• Fairness using Trusted Hardware
• Fairness in Randomness generation
• Game-theoretic fairness notions - collusion models
• Fairness in DeFi applications
• Fair reward distribution in consensus algorithms
• Fair Payments in Cryptocurrencies
• Co-operative Games and Fairness Equilibriums
• Fairness in Digital Auctions
• Legal and Policy framework for Fairness

Building on our first edition at FC'25, this second edition will have invited talks from leading researchers from academia and industry experts to showcase recent progress on these evolving challenges, followed by a panel discussion that will focus on uncovering new problem domains, promote cross-disciplinary research in developing practical solutions with real-world impact.

If you are interested in contributing a talk, please reach out to us!

Speakers