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Smart contracts, the cornerstone of blockchain technology, enable secure, automated distributed execution. Given their role in handling large transaction volumes across clients, miners, and validators, exploring concurrency is critical.…
Existing fair exchange protocols usually neglect consideration of cost when assessing their fairness. However, in an environment with non-negligible transaction cost, e.g., public blockchains, high or unexpected transaction cost might be an…
We present the first in-depth empirical characterization of the costs of trading on a decentralized exchange (DEX). Using quoted prices from the Uniswap Labs interface for two pools -- USDC-ETH (5bps) and PEPE-ETH (30bps) -- we evaluate the…
The limit order book mechanism has been the core trading mechanism of the modern financial market. In the cryptocurrency market, centralized exchanges also adopt this limit order book mechanism and a centralized matching engine dynamically…
Cryptocurrency has been extensively studied as a decentralized financial technology built on blockchain. However, there is a lack of understanding of user experience with cryptocurrency exchanges, the main means for novice users to interact…
Decentralized finance (DeFi) has the potential to disrupt centralized finance by validating peer-to-peer transactions through tamper-proof smart contracts, thus significantly lowering the transaction cost charged by financial…
Block production on the Ethereum blockchain has adopted an auction-based mechanism known as Proposer--Builder Separation (PBS), where validators outsource block creation to builders competing in MEV--Boost auctions for Maximal Extractable…
Ethereum 2.0, as the preeminent smart contract blockchain platform, guarantees the precise execution of applications without third-party intervention. At its core, this system leverages the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, which…
In the paper, we present designs for multiple blockchain consensus primitives and a novel blockchain system, all based on the use of trusted execution environments (TEEs), such as Intel SGX-enabled CPUs. First, we show how using TEEs for…
Ethereum's transaction pool (mempool) dynamics and fee market efficiency critically affect transaction inclusion, validator workload, and overall network performance. This research empirically analyzes gas price variations, mempool…
Bitcoin transaction fees will become more important as the block subsidy declines, but fee formation is hard to study with blockchain data alone because the relevant queueing environment is unobserved. We develop and estimate a structural…
Trading through decentralized exchanges (DEXs) has become crucial in today's blockchain ecosystem, enabling users to swap tokens efficiently and automatically. However, the capacity of miners to strategically order transactions has led to…
Executing smart contracts is a compute and storage-intensive task, which currently dominates modern blockchain's performance. Given that computers are becoming increasingly multicore, concurrency is an attractive approach to improve…
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…
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) represents a pivotal challenge within the Ethereum ecosystem; it impacts the fairness, security, and efficiency of both Layer 1 (L1) and Layer 2 (L2) networks. MEV arises when miners or validators manipulate…
Smart contract access control mechanisms can introduce centralization into supposedly decentralized ecosystems. In our view, such centralization is an overlooked risk of smart contracts that underlies well-known smart contract security…
Financial markets have evolved over centuries, and exchanges have converged to rely on the order book mechanism for market making. Latency on the blockchain, however, has prevented decentralized exchanges (DEXes) from utilizing the order…
The advent of Ethereum 2.0 has introduced significant changes, particularly the shift to Proof-of-Stake consensus. This change presents new opportunities and challenges for arbitrage. Amidst these changes, we introduce BriDe Arbitrager, a…
Opening up data produced by the Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile devices for public utilization can maximize their economic value. Challenges remain in the trustworthiness of the data sources and the security of the trading process,…
Blockchain networks are facing increasingly heterogeneous computational demands, and in response, protocol designers have started building specialized infrastructure to supply that demand. This paper introduces Resonance: a new kind of…