Related papers: Competitive equilibria between staking and on-chai…
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…
Consensus protocols used today in blockchains often rely on computational power or financial stakes - scarce resources. We propose a novel protocol using social capital - trust and influence from social interactions - as a non-transferable…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is a Sybil control mechanism adopted in blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. It prevents the attempt of malicious actors to manipulate distributed ledgers. Bitcoin has successfully suppressed double-spending by accepting…
The distributed consensus mechanism is the backbone of the rapidly developing blockchain network. Blockchain platforms consume vast amounts of electricity based on the current consensus mechanism of Proof of Work. Here, we point out an…
Proof-of-Stake blockchains based on a longest-chain consensus protocol are an attractive energy-friendly alternative to the Proof-of-Work paradigm. However, formal barriers to "getting the incentives right" were recently discovered, driven…
The introduction of Bitcoin fueled the development of blockchain-based resilient data management systems that are resilient against failures, enable federated data management, and can support data provenance. The key factor determining the…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is a popular consensus protocol used by Bitcoin since its inception. PoW has the well-known flaw of assigning all the reward to the single miner (or pool) that inserts the new block. This has the consequence of making…
The security of most existing cryptocurrencies is based on a concept called Proof-of-Work, in which users must solve a computationally hard cryptopuzzle to authorize transactions (`one unit of computation, one vote'). This leads to enormous…
The proposed smart contract can prevent seven cyber attacks, such as Denial of Service (DoS), Man in the Middle Attack (MITM), Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), 51\%, Injection attacks, Routing Attack, and Eclipse attack. The Delegated…
Blockchain plays a crucial role in ensuring the security and integrity of decentralized systems, with the proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism being fundamental for achieving distributed consensus. As PoW blockchains see broader adoption, an…
This paper introduces the Proof of Sampling (PoSP) protocol, a Nash Equilibrium-based verification mechanism, and its application to decentralized machine learning inference through spML. Our protocol has a pure strategy Nash Equilibrium,…
This paper presents a study of the Poof-of-Stake (PoW) Ethereum consensus protocol, following the recent switch from Proof-of-Work (PoS) to Proof-of-Stake within Merge upgrade. The new protocol has resulted in reduced energy consumption and…
Permissionless consensus protocols require a scarce resource to regulate leader election and provide Sybil resistance. Existing paradigms such as Proof of Work and Proof of Stake instantiate this scarcity through parallelizable resources…
We analyze bribing attacks in Proof-of-Stake distributed ledgers from a game theoretic perspective. In bribing attacks, an adversary offers participants a reward in exchange for instructing them how to behave, with the goal of attacking the…
Open-access blockchains based on proof-of-work protocols have gained tremendous popularity for their capabilities of providing decentralized tamper-proof ledgers and platforms for data-driven autonomous organization. Nevertheless, the…
The rise of computational power has led to unprecedented performance gains for deep learning models. As more data becomes available and model architectures become more complex, the need for more computational power increases. On the other…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) systems face critical challenges, including excessive energy consumption and the centralization of mining power among entities with expensive hardware. Static mining pools exacerbate these issues by reducing competition…
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…
Proof of Authority (PoA) is a type of permissioned consensus algorithm with a fixed committee. PoA has been widely adopted by communities and industries due to its better performance and faster finality. In this paper, we explore the…
We study the risks of validator reuse across multiple services in a restaking protocol. We characterize the robust security of a restaking network as a function of the buffer between the costs and profits from attacks. For example, our…