Related papers: Formal Barriers to Longest-Chain Proof-of-Stake Pr…
Blockchain protocols implement total-order broadcast in a permissionless setting, where processes can freely join and leave. In such a setting, to safeguard against Sybil attacks, correct processes rely on cryptographic proofs tied to a…
The rise of computational power has led to unprecedented performance gains for deep learning models. As more data becomes available and model architectures become more complex, the need for more computational power increases. On the other…
Electronic voting consistently fails to supplant conventional paper ballot due to a plethora of security shortcomings. Not only are traditional voting methods mediocre in terms of convenience and interface, they also encompass…
Bitcoin is the first fully-decentralized permissionless blockchain protocol to achieve a high level of security, but at the expense of poor throughput and latency. Scaling the performance of Bitcoin has a been a major recent direction of…
Despite all the progress in quantum technologies over the last decade, there is still a dearth of practical applications for quantum computers with a small number of noisy qubits. The effort to show quantum supremacy has been largely…
Committee-based blockchains are among the most popular alternatives of proof-of-work based blockchains, such as Bitcoin. They provide strong consistency (no fork) under classical assumptions, and avoid using energy-consuming mechanisms to…
To address the large amount of energy wasted by blockchains, we propose a decentralized consensus protocol for blockchains in which the computation can be used to search for good approximate solutions to any optimization problem. Our…
Proof of work cryptocurrencies began with the promise of a more egalitarian future with a decentralized monetary system with no powerful entities in charge. While this vision is far from realized, these cryptocurrencies are still touted to…
Regardless of their variations, blockchains require a consensus mechanism to validate transactions, supervise added blocks, maintain network security, synchronize the network state, and distribute incentives. Proof-of-Work (PoW), one of the…
Blockchains offer a decentralized and secure execution environment strong enough to host cryptocurrencies, but the state-replication model makes on-chain computation expensive. To avoid heavy on-chain workloads, systems like Truebit and…
Blockchains have recently gained popularity thanks to their ability to record "digital truth". They are designed to keep persistence, security, and avoid attacks which is useful for many applications. However, they are still problematic in…
Layer 1 (L1) blockchains such as Ethereum are secured under an "honest supermajority of stake" assumption for a large pool of validators who verify each and every transaction on it. This high security comes at a scalability cost which not…
We propose the formal study of governed blockchains that are owned and controlled by organizations and that neither create cryptocurrencies nor provide any incentives to solvers of cryptographic puzzles. We view such approaches as…
A blockchain faces two fundamental challenges. It must motivate users to maintain the system while preventing a minority of these users from colluding and gaining disproportionate control. Many popular public blockchains use monetary…
This master thesis deals with Blockchain Technology in mobile turn based peer to peer games. First, it investigates the capabilities of Blockchain Technology to be used for gaming applications. In this regard, among others,…
Blockchain is rapidly emerging as an important class of network application, with a unique set of trust, security and transparency properties. In a blockchain system, participants record and update the `server-side' state of an application…
Bitcoin is a "crypto currency", a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography which has recently gained excessive popularity. Scientific research on bitcoin is less abundant. A paper at Financial Cryptography 2012…
Current blockchain protocols (e.g., Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake) secure the ledger yet cannot measure validator trustworthiness, allowing subtle misconduct that is especially damaging in decentralized-finance (DeFi) settings. We…
We propose a refinement to the well known, and widely used, proof-of-work scheme of zeroing a cryptographic hash. Our refinement allows multiple autonomous users to cooperate on the proof-of-work for their own transactions in order to bring…
This paper we define a new Puzzle called Proof-of-Interaction and we show how it can replace, in the Bitcoin protocol, the Proof-of-Work algorithm.