Related papers: Incentives in Ethereum's Hybrid Casper Protocol
Modern blockchains, such as Ethereum, enable the execution of so-called smart contracts - programs that are executed across a decentralised network of nodes. As smart contracts become more popular and carry more value, they become more of…
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…
We initiate the study of transaction fee mechanism design for blockchain protocols in which multiple block producers contribute to the production of each block. Our contributions include: - We propose an extensive-form (multi-stage) game…
This paper reports on the development and verification of a novel formal symbolic process virtual machine (FSPVM) for verifying the reliability and security of Ethereum smart contracts, denoted as FSPVM-E, completely in Coq proof assistant.…
The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is a decentralized computing engine. It enables the Ethereum blockchain to execute smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps). The increasing adoption of Ethereum sparked the rise of phishing…
This paper introduces the Fair Fairness Benchmark (\textsf{FFB}), a benchmarking framework for in-processing group fairness methods. Ensuring fairness in machine learning is important for ethical compliance. However, there exist challenges…
At the technical level, the goal of Interledger is to provide an architecture and a minimal set of protocols to enable interoperability between any value transfer systems. The Interledger protocol is a protocol for inter-blockchain payments…
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…
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…
Immediate settlement, or single-slot finality (SSF), is a long-term goal for Ethereum. The growing active validator set size is placing an increasing computational burden on the network, making SSF more challenging. EIP-7251 aims to reduce…
For applications of Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols where the participants are economic agents, recent works highlighted the importance of accountability: the ability to identify participants who provably violate the…
Bitcoin and Ethereum, whose miners arguably collectively comprise the most powerful computational resource in the history of mankind, offer no more power for processing and verifying transactions than a typical smart phone. The system…
Gas is a measurement unit of the computational effort that it will take to execute every single operation that takes part in the Ethereum blockchain platform. Each instruction executed by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) has an associated…
Classic BFT consensus protocols guarantee safety and liveness for all clients if fewer than one-third of replicas are faulty. However, in applications such as high-value payments, some clients may want to prioritize safety over liveness.…
An emerging blockchain protocol design pattern leverages the asymmetry between the computational effort in performing versus verifying tasks. For example, cryptographic validity proofs (e.g., SNARKS) require the prover to expend significant…
We describe a mechanism to create fair and explainable incentives for software developers to reward contributions to security of a product. We use cooperative game theory to model the actions of the developer team inside a risk management…
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as a decentralized proof of ownership represent one of the main reasons why Ethereum is a disruptive technology. This paper presents the first systematic study of the interactions occurring in a number of NFT…
Over the past five years, the rewards associated with mining Proof-of-Work blockchains have increased substantially. As a result, miners are heavily incentivized to design and utilize Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) that…
In blockchain systems, especially cryptographic currencies such as Bitcoin, the double-spending and Byzantine-general-like problem are solved by reaching consensus protocols among all nodes. The state-of-the-art protocols include…
A new variation of blockchain proof of work algorithm is proposed to incentivize the timely execution of image processing algorithms. A sample image processing algorithm is proposed to determine interesting images using analysis of the…