Master’s Thesis Software Engineering (2nd Semester)

At Anchorage we are building the world’s most advanced digital asset platform for institutions to participate in crypto.Founded in 2017, Anchorage Digital is a regulated crypto platform that provides institutions with integrated financial services and infrastructure solutions. With the first federally chartered crypto bank in the US, Anchorage offers institutions an unparalleled combination of secure custody, regulatory compliance, product breadth, and client service. We’re looking to diversify our team with people who are humble, creative, and eager to learn.We are a remote-first, global team, but provide the option of working in-office in San Francisco, New York City, Indianapolis, Sioux Falls, Porto, and Singapore.Looking for an interesting thesis topic?  Pursuing a Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field and want to focus your Master’s thesis on crypto related topics?  Join Anchorage during your final semester of your Master’s program to work on an interesting thesis topic in industry to help prepare you for life after graduation while building upon your current skills!  Listed below are project ideas.By joining Anchorage not only will you be a part of a top notch team, we also expect you to help the team grow as a whole. From your technical expertise and architecting skills to mentoring, we work as a team end to end.  We thrive to always improve. We have very ambitious goals and those goals should be very clear to everyone. If we know where we're going, your initiatives, your proactiveness, is highly encouraged and valued. As we're growing, the team also is. This means that if you have the ambition to go deep technically, lead teams or manage them, it's up to you to show us you want to do it. If you're successful, so is everyone at Anchorage!At Anchorage, we believe the product is never "done," we can always do better! When you join Anchorage, we expect you to drive our products forward by developing novel solutions for our institutional clients. As a team, we are constantly striving to innovate in order to build the future of cryptocurrency and the digital asset ecosystem.Thesis Topics:Thesis Title: Blockchain-based Training Recognition PlatformIn highly competitive and regulated business environments, such as the financial services industry, providing and recognizing collaborators' training is increasingly important. Specifically on high-regulated environments, such as where Anchorage operates, being able to prove, behind of a doubt, that employees took all the mandatory training is evermore relevant.There are a number of platforms/solutions on the market that provide this kind of service. Unfortunately, most of them are based on centralized systems. Trust on centralized systems is intrinsically related to the trust we deposit on the institution that owns/runs the platform and it’s not impossible to fake certifications / proof that someone took the course (and when).Goals:This dissertation aims to solve this problem by building a blockchain-based platform to seamlessly award badges and verify and track achievements. By using blockchain, this platform will provide, behind the shadow of a doubt, the ability to check when such a badge/recognition was awarded, in an irreversible and irrevocable manner.Innovation:Using blockchain technology for tracking and management of badges and training recognition paves a way forward to provide behind of a doubt records that can be publicly audited. At the same time provides challenges to day-to-day operations such as certification revocation and timing issues regarding blockchain execution of said operations. Due to these reasons this project will tackle several challenges not tackled in this field of study yet. Work Plan:Preliminary Phase (Preparation prior to starting):-Understand different how blockchains proof mechanisms work;-Research different accreditation tools (for other platforms / technologies) and their most valuable features;Development Phase (Work Plan):-The Anchorage ecosystem-How Anchorage integrates with the blockchain;-Requirements gathering and analysis-Development-Testing-Roll-out to productionBibliography:https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-39028-4_9https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8656511https://info.badgr.com/https://info.credly.com/Thesis Title: Blockchain Monitoring SystemBlockchains are independent by design. Their development, QA, and release cycles are all bespoke. Anchorage Digital, being the leader in digital assets custody (among other things), needs to interact with these networks directly and reliably.  Because Anchorage does not control these environments (by design nobody controls them usually), we have to handle unexpected situations, such as failures in communication, backwards incompatible upgrades, forks, etc.Goal:The goal of this project is to bring the concept of “status page” to the blockchain. At Anchorage, and as we add support for more and more blockchains, we want to be able to easily and reliably assess the health status of a blockchain. This is the very first step when triaging any issues, and a very difficult one for the reasons mentioned.  Create an adequate abstraction of blockchain health checks. They may include, but are not limited to, block production, transaction processing rate, average fees, etc.  It is important to note that in order to make these checks reliable, you may have to develop interactions with multiple 3rd party APIs and websites in order to fetch the relevant information from multiple (redundant) sources.  Such abstraction needs to be extensible, so new health metrics can easily be added in the future.  Create health check adapters for blockchains currently supported by Anchorage. This requires a non-negligible amount of research in order to understand how different blockchains behave.  Create a dashboard where the information collected can be easily digested.Innovative Aspects:Blockchains are decentralized by nature, which means that their management and status monitoring is a massive engineering undertaking.  On the other hand, Blockchains are also a fairly new construct, and because of that, we have to handle unexpected situations, such as failures in communication, backwards incompatible upgrades, forks, etc.Some of the innovative aspects are:Understand how to generalize different blockchain primitives into a single, coherent, framework;Building a common framework for blockchain status updates;Provide near real-time notifications and alerts for on-call/support engineers.Work Plan:Preliminary Phase (Preparation prior to starting):-Understand different how blockchains proof mechanisms work;-Research different monitoring tools (for other platforms / technologies) work and their most valuable features;Development Phase (Work Plan):-The Anchorage ecosystem-How Anchorage integrates with the blockchain;-Requirements gathering and analysis-Development-Testing-Roll-out to productionBibliography:https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-39028-4_9https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8656511Thesis Title:  Notifications HubTeamAnchorage Digital is the most advanced digital asset platform, for secure crypto custody, trading, staking, governance, and more.  Anchorage is the only federally chartered digital asset bank in the United States and provides tailored services to financial institutions.  In an ever connected world such as ours, the financial system never sleeps. That's especially true for digital assets, such as cryptocurrencies, that can be traded and transferred 24/7/365. Because of this, many decisions need to happen on the go and users want to be notified when an operation requires their attention.  With phones, tables, smartwatches and a multitude of devices at our disposal, each user has preferences regarding the means of being notified.Goal:The goal of this project is to develop a Notifications Hub on top of Anchorage Digital Platform, allowing customers to customize their preferences according to event type and schedule, providing an extendable framework for multiple notification targets (E-mail, Slack, Push Notifications, Microsoft Teams and others).Innovative Aspects:  Creation of a notification system for crypto-financial applications, highly scalable, in a multi-platform context, applied to a banking system that operates 24/7/365. Work Plan:Preliminary Phase (Preparation prior to starting):-Understand different how blockchains proof mechanisms work;-Research different notification hubs (for other platforms / technologies) and their most valuable features;Development Phase (Work Plan):-The Anchorage ecosystem-How Anchorage integrates with the blockchain;-Requirements gathering and analysis-Development-Testing-Roll-out to productionBibliography:https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-39028-4_9https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8656511Thesis Project:  Transfer Risk AssessmentAnchorage Digital is the most advanced digital assets platform for secure crypto custody, trading, staking, governance and lending. Anchorage is the only federally chartered digital asset bank in the United States and provides tailored services to financial institutions.Balancing security with ease of usage is a challenge that dates back thousands of years. At Anchorage we are proud to continuously build and maintain an advanced and secure digital assets platform that allows customers to maintain their assets safe but at the same time easily accessible. One of those security steps is the existence of a quorum, which adds an extra layer of security around asset transactions, especially to accounts outside Anchorage custody.With the boom of new financial services around digital assets, new usages for our services continue to appear and many of them require automated transactions, using APIs, that allow financial institutions to make thousands of transactions everyday.Goal:The goal of this project is to create an AI-based proof-of-concept (PoC) system that integrates with Anchorage Risk Dashboard, and automatically identifies fraudulent transactions alerting our Risk Team that will manually review and decide if the identified transactions should or not be approved.Innovative Aspects: Application of AI based risk management to crypto transactions, following OCC (USA) regulations.Work Plan:Preliminary Phase (Preparation prior to starting):-Understand different how blockchains proof mechanisms work;-Research different tools for the traditional financial sector (for other platforms / technologies) and their most valuable features;Development Phase (Work Plan):-The Anchorage ecosystem-How Anchorage integrates with the blockchain;-Requirements gathering and analysis-Development-Testing-Roll-out to productionBibliography:https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-39028-4_9https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8656511Thesis Project:  Trading Simulator with Real Market DataAnchorage Digital is the most advanced digital assets platform for secure crypto custody, trading, staking, governance and lending. Anchorage is the only federally chartered digital asset bank in the United States and provides tailored services to financial institutions.As we build a cryptocurrencies trading system capable of handling the workflows of institutional grade customers, it is extremely important to further enhance the testing infrastructure, mitigating risk.Build a simulator capable of executing trades using different order types, simulating price slippage, and generating execution reports. Additionally, the simulator must be capable of capturing and replaying production market data, as well as allowing for market data to be injected in order to produce repeatable results.Objectives/Goals: Further enhance the testing of the trading infrastructure at Anchorage Digital by allowing to simulate different market conditions and test how the system reacts to them. Innovative character: The project allows further exploration of advanced trading strategies and in-house backtesting, which is critical to meet the demands of a high-frequency cryptocurrency trading platform that operates 24/7/365.Work Plan:Preliminary Phase (Preparation prior to starting):-Understand how trading works and what market data is-Requirements gathering and analysisDevelopment Phase (Work Plan):-Building an order book that subscribes to market data feeds-Building a trade placement interface that allows entering trades of different types and parameters-Implement order matching logic that will fill or reject orders-Build a replay framework that can record and inject market data into the simulator-Testing-Integration with Anchorage’s test suiteBibliography:She529: Beginner’s Guide to CryptoWhat is cryptocurrency trading?What is market data?What is an order book?What is backtesting?

You will:

• Build secure, resilient, and global infrastructure from the ground up! 
• Review code across the entire stack and engineering organization while actively participating in product development. 
• Find the right balance between progress (i.e. shipping quickly) and perfection (i.e. measuring twice). 
• Foster an efficient deterministic testing culture, with an emphasis on minimizing tech debt and bureaucracy.
• Influence architecture/product roadmap - have a seat at the table. 
• Collaborate cross-functionally with everyone.
• Work on the front lines of the blockchain/crypto movement and SecOps innovation. 
• Ship code that will impact the global economy.

You may be a fit for the thesis research if:

• You are pursuing a Master’s degree in Computer Science or similar major and will be working on your thesis during the second semester.
• You have experience building distributed systems.  We mostly use Go, however languages can be learned. We really care about your engineering skills more than any specific language or framework.
• You enjoy building services from scratch and supporting them over time. 
• You have a deep appreciation for code quality and test infrastructure. 
• You prioritize end-user experience and business value over “cool tech.”
• You have developed “computer science fundamentals”, i.e. concurrency, algorithms, and data structures.
• You’re comfortable navigating environments that are constantly changing, such as a high growth startup.
• You self describe as some combination of the following: creative, humble, ambitious, detail-oriented, hardworking, trustworthy, eager to learn, methodical, action-oriented, and tenacious.

Tech Stack:

• While experience with specific languages isn’t a requirement our stack is:
• Backend Tech: Go, C++, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Vault, GCP, AWS, and GraphQL.
• Engineering methodologies: Reverse uptime, cryptographically linked data models, tamper resistant ledgers, air gapped infrastructure, secure execution environments, repeatable builds, and infra-as-code.

About Anchorage Digital - People: Who we areThe Anchorage Village, what we call our team, brings together the brightest minds from platform security, financial services, and distributed ledger technology to provide the building blocks that empower institutions to safely participate in  the evolving digital asset ecosystem. As  a diverse team of more than 300 members, we are united in one common goal: building the future of finance by providing the foundation upon which value moves safely in the new global economy. Anchorage Digital is committed to being a welcoming and inclusive workplace for everyone, and we are intentional about making sure people feel respected, supported and connected at work—regardless of who you are or where you come from. We value and celebrate our differences and we believe being open about who we are allows us to do the best work of our lives. Anchorage Digital is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate against qualified applicants or employees on the basis of race, color, religion, gender identity, sex, sexual preference, sexual identity, pregnancy, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, marital status, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, military status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law, rule, or regulation.

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