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Scalability is a crucial requirement for modern large-scale systems, enabling elasticity and ensuring responsiveness under varying load. While cloud systems have achieved scalable architectures, blockchain systems remain constrained by the…
Blockchain technology promises to overcome trust and privacy concerns inherent to centralized information sharing. However, current decentralized supply chain management systems do either not meet privacy and scalability requirements or…
Micropayment channels are the most prominent solution to the limitation on transaction throughput in current blockchain systems. However, in practice channels are risky because participants have to be online constantly to avoid fraud, and…
Classic Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols forfeit liveness in the face of asynchrony in order to preserve safety, whereas most deployed blockchain protocols forfeit safety in order to remain live. In this work, we achieve the…
In this paper, 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…
Recently, cybersecurity becomes more and more important due to the rapid development of Internet. However, existing methods are in reality highly sensitive to attacks and are far more vulnerable than expected, as they are lack of trustable…
Blockchain is an incipient technology that offers many strengths compared to traditional systems, such as decentralization, transparency and traceability. However, if the technology is to be used for processing personal data, complementary…
Off-chain protocols (channels) are a promising solution to the scalability and privacy challenges of blockchain payments. Current proposals, however, require synchrony assumptions to preserve the safety of a channel, leaking to an adversary…
Activity-tracking applications and location-based services using short-range communication (SRC) techniques have been abruptly demanded in the COVID-19 pandemic, especially for automated contact tracing. The attention from both public and…
Permissionless blockchains protocols such as Bitcoin are inherently limited in transaction throughput and latency. Current efforts to address this key issue focus on off-chain payment channels that can be combined in a Payment-Channel…
Most self-service payment terminals require network connectivity for processing electronic payments. The necessity to maintain network connectivity increases costs, introduces cybersecurity risks, and significantly limits the number of…
Many of the problems that arise in the context of blockchains and decentralized finance can be seen as variations on classical problems of distributed computing. The smart contract model proposed here is intended to capture both the…
Increasing the transactional throughput of decentralized blockchains in a secure manner has been the holy grail of blockchain research for most of the past decade. This paper introduces a scheme for scaling blockchains while retaining…
Smart contracts enable users to execute payments depending on complex program logic. Ethereum is the most notable example of a blockchain that supports smart contracts leveraged for countless applications including games, auctions and…
The Philos Marketplace blockchain system is a proposed hierarchical blockchain architecture which allows a large number of individual blockchains to operate in parallel. These parallel chains achieve consensus among one another on a limited…
Blockchain technology has spawned a vast ecosystem of digital currencies with Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) -- digital forms of fiat currency -- being one of them. An important feature of digital currencies is facilitating…
Sharding is used to address the performance and scalability issues of the blockchain protocols, which divides the overall transaction processing costs among multiple clusters of nodes. Shards require less storage capacity and communication…
Performance and scalability are major concerns for blockchains: permissionless systems are typically limited by slow proof of X consensus algorithms and sequential post-order transaction execution on every node of the network. By…
To enable high-performance and scalable blockchains, we need to step away from traditional consensus-based fully-replicated designs. One direction is to explore the usage of sharding in which we partition the managed dataset over many…
Consensus is arguably one of the most important notions in distributed computing. Among asynchronous, randomized, and signature-free implementations, the protocols of Most\'efaoui et al. (PODC 2014 and JACM 2015) represent a landmark…