Related papers: The Scalability of Trustless Trust
Blockchain and smart contracts have garnered significant interest in recent years as the foundation of a decentralized, trustless digital ecosystem, thereby eliminating the need for traditional centralized authorities. Despite their central…
Blockchain has attracted a broad range of interests from start-ups, enterprises and governments to build next generation applications in a decentralized manner. Similar to cloud platforms, a single blockchain-based system may need to serve…
On several proof-of-stake blockchains, agents engaged in validating transactions can open a pool to which others can delegate their stake in order to earn higher returns. We develop a model of staking pool formation in the presence of…
Cooperation is fundamental for human prosperity. Blockchain, as a trust machine, is a cooperative institution in cyberspace that supports cooperation through distributed trust with consensus protocols. While studies in computer science…
Distributed Computing in Blockchain Technology (BCT) hinges on a trust assumption among independent nodes. Without a third-party interface or what is known as a Blockchain Oracle, it can not interact with the external world. This Oracle…
In an economy with asymmetric information, the smart contract in the blockchain protocol mitigates uncertainty. Since, as a new trading platform, the blockchain triggers segmentation of market and differentiation of agents in both the sell…
We identify a subtle security issue that impacts mechanism design in scenarios in which agents can absolutely commit to strategies. Absolute commitments allow the strategy of an agent to depend on the commitments made by the other agents.…
The challenge to establish and verify human identity over the Internet in a secure and privacy-respecting way is long-standing. In this paper, we explore the blockchain trilemma of scalability, security, and decentralization in the context…
We consider agents in a social network competing to be selected as partners in collaborative, mutually beneficial activities. We study this through a model in which an agent i can initiate a limited number k_i>0 of games and selects the…
Blockchain technology has evolved as a promising means to transform data management models in many domains including healthcare, agricultural research, tourism domains etc. In the research community, a usable blockchain-based system can…
We put forward the idea that classical blockchains and smart contracts are potentially useful primitives not only for classical cryptography, but for quantum cryptography as well. Abstractly, a smart contract is a functionality that allows…
We identify a subtle security issue that impacts the design of smart contracts, because agents may themselves deploy smart contracts (side contracts). Typically, equilibria of games are analyzed in vitro, under the assumption that players…
In the high-stakes race to develop more scalable blockchains, some platforms (Binance, Cosmos, EOS, TRON, etc.) have adopted committee-based consensus (CBC) protocols, whereby the blockchain's record-keeping rights are entrusted to a…
Since the Merge update upon which Ethereum transitioned to Proof of Stake, it has been touted that it resulted in lower power consumption and increased security. However, even if that is the case, can this state be sustained? In this paper,…
The industrial market continuously needs reliable solutions to secure autonomous systems. Especially as these systems become more complex and interconnected, reliable security solutions are becoming increasingly important. One promising…
Blockchains are widely used for secure transaction processing, but their scalability remains limited, and existing multichain designs are typically static even as demand and capacity shift. We cast blockchain configuration as a multiagent…
Fintech provides technological services to increase operational efficiency in financial institutions, but traditional perimeter-based defense mechanisms are insufficient against evolving cyber threats like insider attacks, malware…
Agentic AI systems -- Large Language Models (LLMs) augmented with planning, tool use, memory, and long-horizon interactions -- can execute complex tasks autonomously, but their multi-step trajectories introduce new failure modes that…
Currently, there is no universal method to track who shared what, with whom, when and for what purposes in a verifiable way to create an individual incentive for data owners. A platform that allows data owners to control, delete, and get…
Blockchain has become a popular emergent technology in many industries. It is suitable for a broad range of applications, from its base role as an immutable distributed ledger to the deployment of distributed applications. Many…