Related papers: Improving Bitcoin's Resilience to Churn
This paper introduces Hamster, a novel synchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance protocol that achieves better performance and has weaker dependency on synchrony. Specifically, Hamster employs coding techniques to significantly decrease…
Recent studies have suggested that the stability of peer-to-peer networks may rely on persistent peers, who dwell on the network after they obtain the entire file. In the absence of such peers, one piece becomes extremely rare in the…
Traditional Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) state machine replication protocols assume a partial synchrony model, leading to a design where a leader replica drives the protocol and is replaced after a timeout. Recently, we witnessed a surge…
We construct the Bitcoin User Network (BUN) directly from raw blockchain data up to late 2025, which allows us to explore its mesoscopic properties and trace its temporal evolution. In particular, we analyze the structure of connected…
Edge computing draws a lot of recent research interests because of the performance improvement by offloading many workloads from the remote data center to nearby edge nodes. Nonetheless, one open challenge of this emerging paradigm lies in…
The security of Bitcoin protocols is deeply dependent on the incentives provided to miners, which come from a combination of block rewards and transaction fees. As Bitcoin experiences more halving events, the protocol reward converges to…
Byzantine State Machine Replication (SMR) is a long studied topic that received increasing attention recently with the advent of blockchains as companies are trying to scale them to hundreds of nodes. Byzantine SMRs try to increase…
Bitcoin is a popular digital currency for online payments, realized as a decentralized peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Bitcoin keeps a ledger of all transactions; the majority of the participants decides on the correct ledger. Since…
This paper proposes a random network model for blockchains, a distributed hierarchical data structure of blocks that has found several applications in various industries. The model is parametric on two probability distribution functions…
Secure and scalable data sharing is essential for collaborative clinical decision making. Conventional clinical data efforts are often siloed, however, which creates barriers to efficient information exchange and impedes effective treatment…
We present Union, a trust-minimized bridge protocol that enables secure transfer of BTC between Bitcoin and a secondary blockchain. The growing ecosystem of blockchain systems built around Bitcoin has created a pressing need for secure and…
Proof-of-Stake systems randomly choose, on each round, one of the participants as a consensus leader that extends the chain with the next block such that the selection probability is proportional to the owned stake. However, distributed…
Longest-chain blockchain protocols, such as Bitcoin, guarantee liveness even when the number of actively participating users is variable, i.e., they are adaptive. However, they are not safe under network partitions, i.e., they do not…
Blockchain technology provides an auditable and tamper-proof distributed storage infrastructure for information records. This can be leveraged to support distributed workflow management. Compared to proof-of-work consensus, popularized by…
The CAP theorem says that no blockchain can be live under dynamic participation and safe under temporary network partitions. To resolve this availability-finality dilemma, we formulate a new class of flexible consensus protocols,…
Blockchain has become one of the most attractive technologies for applications, with a large range of deployments such as production, economy, or banking. Under the hood, Blockchain technology is a type of distributed database that supports…
Blockchain technologies are expected to make a significant impact on a variety of industries. However, one issue holding them back is their limited transaction throughput, especially compared to established solutions such as distributed…
Collaborative cybersecurity relies on organizations sharing information to boost security, but trust management is a key concern. Decentralized solutions like distributed ledgers, particularly blockchain, are crucial for eliminating single…
Sharding distributed ledgers is a promising on-chain solution for scaling blockchains but lacks formal grounds, nurturing skepticism on whether such complex systems can scale blockchains securely. We fill this gap by introducing the first…
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are realized using distributed systems and hence critically rely on the performance and security of the interconnecting network. The requirements on these networks and their usage, however can differ…