Related papers: Cross-Chain Payment Protocols with Success Guarant…
Sharding enhances blockchain scalability by dividing the network into shards, each managing specific unspent transaction outputs or accounts. As an introduced new transaction type, cross-shard transactions pose a critical challenge to the…
Recent years have witnessed a rapid development of platform economy, as it effectively addresses the trust dilemma between untrusted online buyers and merchants. However, malicious platforms can misuse users' funds and information, causing…
Recent advances have improved the throughput and latency of blockchains by processing transactions accessing different parts of the state concurrently. However, these systems are unable to concurrently process (a) transactions accessing the…
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…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) have emerged as a scalability solution for blockchains built on the concept of a payment channel: a setting that allows two nodes to safely transact between themselves in high frequencies based on…
An option is a financial agreement between two parties to trade two assets. One party is given the right, but not the obligation, to complete the swap before a specified termination time. In todays financial markets, an option is considered…
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…
Many blockchain-based algorithms, such as Bitcoin, implement a decentralized asset transfer system, often referred to as a cryptocurrency. As stated in the original paper by Nakamoto, at the heart of these systems lies the problem of…
Cross-chain transactions today remain slow, costly, and fragmented. Existing custodial exchanges expose users to counterparty and centralization risks, while non-custodial liquidity bridges suffer from capital inefficiency and slow…
The development of blockchain technologies has enabled the trustless execution of so-called smart contracts, i.e. programs that regulate the exchange of assets (e.g., cryptocurrency) between users. In a decentralized blockchain, the state…
Payment channel is a class of techniques designed to solve the scalability problem of blockchain. By establishing channels off the blockchain to form payment channel networks (PCNs), users can make instant payments without interacting with…
We present Accept, a simple, asynchronous transaction system that achieves perfect horizontal scaling. Usual blockchain-based transaction systems come with a fundamental throughput limitation as they require that all (potentially unrelated)…
Many aspects of blockchain-based decentralized finance can be understood as an extension of classical distributed computing. In this paper, we trace the evolution of two interrelated notions: failure and fault-tolerance. In classical…
Smart contracts provide the means to stipulate rules of interaction between mutually distrustful organizations. They encode contractual agreements on the basis of source code, which else need to be contractualized in natural language. While…
Digital money can be implemented efficiently by avoiding consensus. However, no-consensus implementations have drawbacks, as they cannot support smart contracts, and (even more fundamentally) they cannot deal with conflicting transactions.…
Despite the advantages of decentralization and immutability, blockchain technology faces significant scalability and throughput limitations, which has prompted the exploration of off-chain solutions like payment channels. Adaptor signatures…
To mitigate the scalability problem of decentralized cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, the payment channel, which allows two parties to perform secure coin transfers without involving the blockchain, has been proposed. The…
Sidechain techniques improve blockchain scalability and interoperability, providing decentralized exchange and cross-chain collaboration solutions for Internet of Things (IoT) data across various domains. However, current state-of-the-art…
Bitcoin's enormous success has inspired the development of alternative blockchains, such as consortium chains. Several cross-chain protocols have been proposed as ways of connecting these universes of individual blockchains in a distributed…
A major challenge in blockchain sharding protocols is that more than 95% transactions are cross-shard. Not only those cross-shard transactions degrade the system throughput but also double the confirmation time, and exhaust an already…