Related papers: Split-Scale: Scaling Bitcoin by Partitioning the U…
Covenants are linguistic primitives that extend the Bitcoin script language, allowing transactions to constrain the scripts of the redeeming ones. Advocated as a way of improving the expressiveness of Bitcoin contracts while preserving the…
Decentralization has been touted as the principal security advantage which propelled blockchain systems at the forefront of developments in the financial technology space. Its exact semantics nevertheless remain highly contested and…
The rise of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies has led to an explosion of services using distributed ledgers as their underlying infrastructure. However, due to inherently single-service oriented blockchain protocols, such services can bloat…
Digitalisation transforms money from distinguishable physical objects into fungible informational units. A recent theoretical framework predicts that such indistinguishable wealth obeys bosonic occupancy statistics, leading to geometric…
A key constraint that limits the implementation of blockchain in Internet of Things (IoT) is its large storage requirement resulting from the fact that each blockchain node has to store the entire blockchain. This increases the burden on…
Computational task offloading based on edge computing can deal with the performance bottleneck of traditional cloud-based systems for Internet of things (IoT). To further optimize computing efficiency and resource allocation, collaborative…
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…
Scalability is a common issue among the most used permissionless blockchains, and several approaches have been proposed accordingly. As Ethereum is set to be a solid foundation for a decentralized Internet web, the need for tackling…
The Bitcoin protocol allows to save arbitrary data on the blockchain through a special instruction of the scripting language, called OP_RETURN. A growing number of protocols exploit this feature to extend the range of applications of the…
Blockchain technology is affected by massive limitations in scalability with consequent repercussions on performance. This discussion aims at analyzing the state of the art of current available Layer II solutions to overcome these…
Blockchain and blockchain-inspired decentralized applications are on the rise thanks to their unique characteristics such as their decentralized nature, anonymity, and tamper-proof nature; however, blockchain transactions tend to experience…
This paper explores how zero-knowledge proofs can enhance Bitcoin's functionality and privacy. First, we consider Proof-of-Reserve schemes: by using zk-STARKs, a custodian can prove its Bitcoin holdings are more than a predefined threshold…
We condense the theory of blockchains down to a simple and compact set of four type equations (Idealised EUTxO), and to an algebraic characterisation (abstract chunk systems), and exhibit an adjoint pair of functors between them. This gives…
The bitcoin peer-to-peer network has drawn significant attention from researchers, but so far has mostly focused on publicly visible portions of the network, i.e., publicly reachable peers. This mostly ignores the hidden parts of the…
The novel blockchain generation of Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) state machine replication (SMR) protocols focuses on scalability and performance to meet requirements of distributed ledger technology (DLT), e.g., decentralization and…
Blockchain technology is the first successful Bitcoin Network. It enables the ledger to become more decentralized and secure. Since it is not limited to bitcoin and controlled by third parties by government, corporations or banks, the…
Sharding is the prevalent approach to breaking the trilemma of simultaneously achieving decentralization, security, and scalability in traditional blockchain systems, which are implemented as replicated state machines relying on atomic…
Although blockchains have become widely popular for their use in cryptocurrencies, they are now becoming pervasive as more traditional applications adopt blockchain to ensure data security. Despite being a secured network, blockchains have…
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…
Blockchain is a technology that provides a distributed ledger that stores previous records while maintaining consistency and security. Bitcoin is the first and largest decentralized electronic cryptographic system that uses blockchain…