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There is growing interest in providing programmatic access to the value locked in Bitcoin, which famously offers limited programmability itself. Various approaches have been put forth in recent years, with the vast majority of proposed…
Byzantine general problem is the core problem of the consensus algorithm, and many protocols are proposed recently to improve the decentralization level, the performance and the security of the blockchain. There are two challenging issues…
Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) are designed for replica convergence without global coordination or consensus. Recent work has achieved the same in a Byzantine environment, through DAG-like structures based on cryptographic…
Following the design of more efficient blockchain consensus algorithms, the execution layer has emerged as the new performance bottleneck of blockchains, especially under high contention. Current parallel execution frameworks either rely on…
As a trusted middleware connecting the blockchain and the real world, the blockchain oracle can obtain trusted real-time price information for financial applications such as payment and settlement, and asset valuation on the blockchain.…
Blockchain databases have attracted widespread attention but suffer from poor scalability due to underlying non-scalable blockchains. While blockchain sharding is necessary for a scalable blockchain database, it poses a new challenge named…
An optimistic rollup (ORU) scales a blockchain's throughput by delegating computation to an untrusted remote chain (L2), refereeing any state claim disagreements between mutually distrusting L2 operators via an interactive dispute…
Smart contracts are applications that execute on blockchains. Today they manage billions of dollars in value and motivate visionary plans for pervasive blockchain deployment. While smart contracts inherit the availability and other security…
One of the most celebrated problems of fault-tolerant distributed computing is the consensus problem. It was shown to abstract a myriad of problems in which processes have to agree on a single value. Consensus applications include…
Smart contracts are programs that are executed on the blockchain and can hold, manage and transfer assets in the form of cryptocurrencies. The contract's execution is then performed on-chain and is subject to consensus, i.e. every node on…
Scalability remains one of the biggest challenges to the adoption of permissioned blockchain technologies for large-scale deployments. Permissioned blockchains typically exhibit low latencies, compared to permissionless deployments --…
Recent works have proposed new Byzantine consensus algorithms for blockchains based on epidemics, a design which enables highly scalable performance at a low cost. These methods however critically depend on a secure random peer sampling…
A popular method in practice offloads computation and storage in blockchains by relying on committing only hashes of off-chain data into the blockchain. This mechanism is acknowledged to be vulnerable to a stalling attack: the blocks…
Most popular blockchain solutions, like Bitcoin, rely on proof-of-work, guaranteeing that the output of the consensus is agreed upon with high probability. However, this probability depends on the delivery of messages and that the…
As blockchain technology continues to evolve and mature, smart contracts have become a key driving force behind the digitization and automation of transactions. Smart contracts greatly simplify and refine the traditional business…
Traditional public blockchain systems typically had very limited transaction throughput because of the bottleneck of the consensus protocol itself. With recent advances in consensus technology, the performance limit has been greatly lifted,…
Data trading is one of the key focuses of Web 3.0. However, all the current methods that rely on blockchain-based smart contracts for data exchange cannot support large-scale data trading while ensuring data security, which falls short of…
Lower bounds and impossibility results in distributed computing are both intellectually challenging and practically important. Hundreds if not thousands of proofs appear in the literature, but surprisingly, the vast majority of them apply…
To implement a blockchain, the trend is now to integrate a non-trivial Byzantine fault tolerant consensus algorithm instead of the seminal idea of waiting to receive blocks to decide upon the longest branch. After a decade of existence,…
Consensus, abstracting a myriad of problems in which processes have to agree on a single value, is one of the most celebrated problems of fault-tolerant distributed computing. Consensus applications include fundamental services for the…