Related papers: Selfish Behavior in the Tezos Proof-of-Stake Proto…
Blockchains have sparked global interest in recent years, gaining importance as they increasingly influence technology and finance. This thesis investigates the robustness of blockchain protocols, specifically focusing on Ethereum…
Optimistic responsiveness -- the ability of a consensus protocol to operate at the speed of the network -- is widely used in consensus protocol design to optimize latency and throughput. However, blockchain applications incentivize…
This paper introduces Proof of Team Sprint (PoTS), a novel consensus algorithm designed to address the significant energy inefficiencies inherent in traditional Proof of Work (PoW) systems. PoTS shifts the consensus mechanism from an…
This paper is concerned with the stability of shares in a cryptocurrency where the new coins are issued according to the Proof of Stake protocol. We identify large, medium and small investors under various rewarding schemes, and show that…
The noisy-storage model allows the implementation of secure two-party protocols under the sole assumption that no large-scale reliable quantum storage is available to the cheating party. No quantum storage is thereby required for the honest…
Selfish Mining is strategic rule-breaking to maximize rewards in proof-of-work protocols [3] and Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are the preferred tool for finding optimal strategies in Bitcoin [4, 10] and similar linear chain protocols…
The Nakamoto longest chain protocol is remarkably simple and has been proven to provide security against any adversary with less than 50% of the total hashing power. Proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols are an energy efficient alternative;…
Both conventional wisdom and empirical evidence suggests that arranging a prior commitment or agreement before an interaction enhances the chance of reaching mutual cooperation. Yet it is not clear what mechanisms can promote the…
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…
The core of many cryptocurrencies is the decentralised validation network operating on proof-of-work technology. In these systems, validation is done by so-called miners who can digitally sign blocks once they solve a computationally-hard…
Proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrencies rely on a balance of security and fairness in order to maintain a sustainable ecosystem of miners and users. Users demand fast and consistent transaction confirmation, and in exchange drive the adoption…
Security analysis of blockchain technology is an active domain of research. There has been both cryptographic and game-theoretic security analysis of Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains. Prominent work includes the cryptographic security…
As cryptographic tokens and altcoins are increasingly being built to serve as utility tokens, the notion of useful work consensus protocols, as opposed to number-crunching PoW consensus, is becoming ever more important. In such contexts,…
We study discounted infinitely repeated games in which players agree on a cooperative mixed action profile but, at each step, observe only the realized pure actions. This form of imperfect monitoring breaks classical trigger strategies,…
Optimistic rollups rely on fraud proofs -- interactive protocols executed on Ethereum to resolve conflicting claims about the rollup's state -- to scale Ethereum securely. To mitigate against potential censorship of protocol moves, fraud…
Selfish miners selectively withhold blocks to earn disproportionately high revenue. The vast majority of the selfish mining literature focuses exclusively on block rewards. Carlsten et al. [2016] is a notable exception, observing that…
It has been known for some time that the Nakamoto consensus as implemented in the Bitcoin protocol is not totally aligned with the individual interests of the participants. More precisely, it has been shown that block withholding mining…
The Decentralized-Consistent-Scale (DCS) Triangle defines three dimensions that illustrate the tradeoffs of the blockchain consensus mechanism. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid consensus protocol, called Deterministic Proof of Work…
Popular Ethereum wallets (like MetaMask) entrust centralized infrastructure providers (e.g., Infura) to run the consensus client logic on their behalf. As a result, these wallets are light-weight and high-performant, but come with security…
Decentralized systems built around blockchain technology promise clients an immutable ledger. They add a transaction to the ledger after it undergoes consensus among the replicas that run a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) or Byzantine Fault-Tolerant…