Related papers: The Ethereum Scratch Off Puzzle
Scalability is a common issue among the most used permissionless blockchains, and several approaches have been proposed to solve this issue. Tackling scalability while preserving the security and decentralization of the network is a…
Smart contracts are the building blocks of the "code is law" paradigm: the smart contract's code indisputably describes how its assets are to be managed - once it is created, its code is typically immutable. Faulty smart contracts present…
We propose a model suggesting that honest-but-rational consensus participants may play timing games, and strategically delay their block proposal to optimize MEV capture, while still ensuring the proposal's timely inclusion in the canonical…
Inspired by Bitcoin, many different kinds of cryptocurrencies based on blockchain technology have turned up on the market. Due to the special structure of the blockchain, it has been deemed impossible to directly trade between traditional…
The security of most existing cryptocurrencies is based on a concept called Proof-of-Work, in which users must solve a computationally hard cryptopuzzle to authorize transactions (`one unit of computation, one vote'). This leads to enormous…
Bitcoin is the most successful cryptocurrency so far. This is mainly due to its novel consensus algorithm, which is based on proof-of-work combined with a cryptographically-protected data structure and a rewarding scheme that incentivizes…
This thesis introduces a formal general framework for scaling blockchain protocols by sharding. The framework is modular and it can be adjusted for different needs or sets of assumptions. We prove that sharded protocols obtained by…
Smart contracts on a blockchain behave precisely as specified by their code. A vulnerability in this code can lead to unexpected behaviour, which is hard to fix because a blockchain does not allow to change smart contract code after its…
As a blockchain platform that has developed vigorously in recent years, Ethereum is different from Bitcoin in that it introduces smart contracts into blockchain.Solidity is one of the most mature and widely used smart contract programming…
Smart contracts are crucial elements of decentralized technologies, but they face significant obstacles to trustworthiness due to security bugs and trapdoors. To address the core issue, we propose a technology that enables programmers to…
In September 2022, Ethereum transitioned from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) during "the merge" - making it the largest PoS cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization. With this work, we present a comprehensive…
Ethereum 2.0, as the preeminent smart contract blockchain platform, guarantees the precise execution of applications without third-party intervention. At its core, this system leverages the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, which…
With the promise of greater decentralization and sustainability, Ethereum transitioned from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. The new consensus protocol introduces novel vulnerabilities that warrant…
In the rapidly evolving domain of distributed ledger technology, scalability and interoperability have become paramount challenges for both academic and industry sectors. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive formal model to address…
While Ethereum has successfully achieved dynamic availability together with safety, a fundamental delay remains between transaction execution and immutable finality. In Ethereum's current Gasper protocol, this latency is on the order of 15…
Ethereum's current Gasper consensus mechanism, which combines the Latest Message Driven Greediest Heaviest Observed SubTree (LMD-GHOST) fork choice rule with the probabilistic Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget (FFG) finality overlay,…
The performance of existing permissionless smart contract platforms such as Ethereum is limited by the consensus layer. Prism is a new proof-of-work consensus protocol that provably achieves throughput and latency up to physical limits…
We propose a framework for threshold cryptosystems under a permissionless-economic model in which the participants are rational profit-maximizing entities. To date, threshold cryptosystems have been considered under permissioned settings…
This paper presents a novel staking coopetition design aimed at incentivizing decentralization and continuous growth of economic security within a proof-of-stake system. Staking rewards follow a nonlinear mapping relative to stake size.…
Blockchain technology adds records to a list using cryptographic links. Therefore, the security of blockchain smart contracts is among the most popular contemporary research topics. To improve the theorem-proving technology in this field,…