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The telecommunications and financial services industries face substantial challenges in inter-operator settlement processes, characterized by extended reconciliation cycles, high transaction costs, and limited real-time transparency.…
In the high-stakes race to develop more scalable blockchains, some platforms (Binance, Cosmos, EOS, TRON, etc.) have adopted committee-based consensus (CBC) protocols, whereby the blockchain's record-keeping rights are entrusted to a…
Cryptocurrencies are poised to revolutionize the modern economy by democratizing commerce. These currencies operate on top of blockchain-based distributed ledgers. Existing permissionless blockchain-based protocols offer unparalleled…
Banking as an essential service can be hard to access in remote, rural regions where the network connectivity is intermittent. Although micro-banking has been made possible by SMS or USSD messages in some places, their security flaws and…
The real estate market includes complex and inefficient mediation processes. Renting a property envolves multiple entities with different responsibilities and interests. Therefore it is imperative to establish a trustful relationship…
Decentralization, which has backed the hyper growth of many blockchains, comes at the cost of scalability. To understand this fundamental limitation, this paper proposes a quantitative measure of blockchain decentralization, and discusses…
Options are fundamental to blockchain-based financial services, offering essential tools for risk management and price speculation, which enhance liquidity, flexibility, and market efficiency in decentralized finance (DeFi). Despite the…
Proponents of blockchains believe that this technology will revolutionize e-commerce. To evaluate this belief, we invite several groups of students to transact on a decentralized peer-to-peer marketplace built on the platform provided by…
Threshold cryptography is essential for many blockchain protocols. For example, many protocols rely on threshold common coin to implement asynchronous consensus, leader elections, and provide support for randomized applications. Similarly,…
A typical blockchain protocol uses consensus to make sure that mutually mistrusting users agree on the order in which their operations on shared data are executed. However, it is known that asset transfer systems, by far the most popular…
Cooperation is fundamental for human prosperity. Blockchain, as a trust machine, is a cooperative institution in cyberspace that supports cooperation through distributed trust with consensus protocols. While studies in computer science…
Blockchain is a novel technology that is rising a lot of interest in the industrial and re- search sectors because its properties of decentralisation, immutability and data integrity. Initially, the underlying consensus mechanism has been…
At the heart of the Bitcoin is a blockchain protocol, a protocol for achieving consensus on a public ledger that records bitcoin transactions. To the extent that a blockchain protocol is used for applications such as contract signing and…
We consider the problem of cross-chain payment whereby customers of different escrows---implemented by a bank or a blockchain smart contract---successfully transfer digital assets without trusting each other. Prior to this work, cross-chain…
Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus forms the foundation of many modern blockchains striving for both high throughput and low latency. A growing bottleneck is transaction execution and validation on the critical path of consensus,…
Public blockchains should be able to scale with respect to the number of nodes and to the transactions workload. The blockchain scalability trilemma has been informally conjectured. This is related to scalability, security and…
Despite being under development for over 15 years, transaction throughput remains one of the key challenges confronting blockchains, which typically has a cap of a limited number of transactions per second. A fundamental factor limiting…
We investigate the market microstructure of Automated Market Makers (AMMs), the most prominent type of blockchain-based decentralized exchanges. We show that the order execution mechanism yields token value loss for liquidity providers if…
We define and examine the shutdown problem for blockchain systems: how to gracefully end the system's operation at the end of its useful life. A particular focus is those blockchain systems that hold archival data of long-lived interest. We…
Blockchain consensus is a state whereby each node in a network agrees on the current state of the blockchain. Existing protocols achieve consensus via a contest or voting procedure to select one node as a dictator to propose new blocks.…