University: RMIT
Principal supervisor:
Dr. Hai Dong
Industry partner: ANZ
Academic Background and Work Experience
A Governance Framework for Real-time Constraint Enforcement in Blockchains
Chanuka graduated from the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka with a first-class (Honours) degree in Computer Science and Engineering. His current research revolves around the analysis and compliance of regulations within blockchain platforms. He is looking at how to measure the degree of compliance of smart contracts and ways to ensure higher compliance levels. This is crucial for institutional participation in blockchains, such as with banking services. This work falls at the intersection of Software Engineering, Formal Analysis, and Process Modelling research domains.
Chanuka works with ANZ bank as part of their Digital Assets Services team developing a multitude of services in public blockchains. While contributing to the overall development efforts, he is specifically looking at regulatory compliance efforts that can be adopted by ANZ.
Thesis Topic
A Governance Framework for Real-time Constraint Enforcement in Blockchains
Chanuka’s thesis topic deals with governing transactions in blockchain environments. Blockchains facilitate automated, direct transactions between end-users. Their automatic nature necessitates governance mechanisms which also function automatically. Otherwise, blockchains have heightened risk exposures to illegal operations such as money laundering. Therefore, it is important to have governance models and control frameworks for different application design patterns. We plan to identify gaps in existing governance protocols & scoring systems, and to critically evaluate and benchmark them.
About ANZ
Australian and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) is one of the major banks in Australia offering a vast array of financial services from retail to institutional banking. They are keen to expand their service portfolio from traditional financial solutions to decentralised finance (DeFi). ANZ is a pioneer in the DeFi space, being the first bank to mint a digital asset linked to the Australian dollar, the A$DC stablecoin. They are looking at novel services that can benefit from distributed ledger technology.