Related papers: The Scalability of Trustless Trust
Ethereum smart contracts are highly powerful, immutable, and able to retain massive amounts of tokens. However, smart contracts keep attracting attackers to benefit from smart contract flaws and Ethereum unexpected behavior. Thus,…
When blockchain systems are said to be trustless, what this really means is that all the trust is put into software. Thus, there are strong incentives to ensure blockchain software is correct -- vulnerabilities here cost millions and break…
The paper presents Pluralize a formal logical framework able to extend the execution of blockchain transactions to events coming from external oracles, like external time, sensor data, human-made declarations, etc. These events are by…
Programmable blockchains have long been a hot research topic given their tremendous use in decentralized applications. Smart contracts, using blockchains as their underlying technology, inherit the desired properties such as verifiability,…
In this paper, we present the first large-scale empirical study of smart contract dependencies, analyzing over 41 million contracts and 11 billion interactions on Ethereum up to December 2024. Our results yield four key insights: (1) 59% of…
The problem of a single point of failure in centralized systems poses a great challenge to the stability of such systems. Meanwhile, the tamperability of data within centralized systems makes users reluctant to trust and use centralized…
Ethereum is a permissionless blockchain ecosystem that supports execution of smart contracts, the key enablers of decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFT). However, the expressiveness of Ethereum smart contracts is a…
For preserving privacy, blockchains can be equipped with dedicated mechanisms to anonymize participants. However, these mechanism often take only the abstraction layer of blockchains into account whereas observations of the underlying…
The disruptive power of blockchain technologies represents a great opportunity to re-imagine standard practices of telecommunication networks and to identify critical areas that can benefit from brand new approaches. As a starting point for…
Due to their immutable log of information, blockchains can be considered as a transparency-enhancing technology. The immutability, however, also introduces threats and challenges with respect to privacy laws and illegal content. Introducing…
Distributed immutable ledgers, or blockchains, allow the secure digitization of evidential transactions without relying on a trusted third-party. Evidential transactions involve the exchange of any form of physical evidence, such as money,…
Blockchain eliminates the need for trusted third-party intermediaries in business by enabling decentralised architecture design in software applications. However, the vulnerabilities in on-chain autonomous decision-makings and cumbersome…
With technological advances and the establishment of e-commerce models, business challenges have shifted to online platforms. The promise of embedding self-executing and autonomous programs into blockchain technologies has attracted…
Public blockchains have spurred the growing popularity of decentralized transactions and smart contracts, but they exhibit limitations on the transaction throughput, storage, and computation. To avoid transaction gridlock, public…
The emerging blockchain technology supports decentralized computing paradigm shift and is a rapidly approaching phenomenon. While blockchain is thought primarily as the basis of Bitcoin, its application has grown far beyond cryptocurrencies…
A blockchain-based smart contract or a "smart contract" for short, is a computer program intended to digitally facilitate the negotiation or contractual terms directly between users when certain conditions are met. With the advance in…
As the significance of blockchain innovation grows and the focus on scalability intensifies, rollup technology has emerged as a promising approach to tackle these scalability concerns. Nonetheless, rollups encounter restrictions when…
Permisionless decentralized ledgers ("blockchains") such as the one underlying the cryptocurrency Bitcoin allow anonymous participants to maintain the ledger, while avoiding control or "censorship" by any single entity. In contrast,…
This study proposes a novel solution that provides secure interoperability for blockchains, which improves the overall scalability of the whole blockchain network. In our solution, a cross-chain task will build a one-time cross-blockchain…
The immutability of smart contracts on blockchain platforms like Ethereum promotes security and trustworthiness but presents challenges for updates, bug fixes, or adding new features post-deployment. These limitations can lead to…