Related papers: Stake Shift in Major Cryptocurrencies: An Empirica…
We study long-term equilibria that arise in the token monetary policy, or tokenomics, design of proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain systems that engage utility maximizing users and validators. Validators are system maintainers who get rewarded…
The security of blockchain systems depends on the distribution of mining power across participants. If sufficient mining power is controlled by one entity, they can force their own version of events. This may allow them to double spend…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is the most widely adopted incentive model in current blockchain systems, which unfortunately is energy inefficient. Proof-of-Stake (PoS) is then proposed to tackle the energy issue. The rich-get-richer concern of PoS…
Blockchain technology has become a trusted method for establishing secure and transparent transactions through a distributed, encrypted network. The operation of blockchain is governed by consensus algorithms, among which Proof of Stake…
All public blockchains are secured by a proof of opportunity cost among block producers. For example, the security offered by proof-of-work (PoW) systems, like Bitcoin, is due to spent computation; it is work precisely because it cannot be…
On September 15, 2022, the Ethereum network adopted a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. We study the impact on the network and competing platforms in a two month event window around the Beacon chain merge. We find that the…
Blockchains are intended to be immutable, so an attacker who is able to delete transactions through a chain reorganization (a malicious reorg) can perform a profitable double-spend attack. We study the rate at which an attacker can execute…
We develop a continuous-time control approach to optimal trading in a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain, formulated as a consumption-investment problem that aims to strike the optimal balance between a participant's (or agent's) utility from…
In this paper, we review the undercutting attacks in the transaction-fee-based regime of proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains with the longest chain fork-choice rule. Next, we focus on the problem of fluctuations in mining revenue and the mining…
With the promise of greater decentralization and sustainability, Ethereum transitioned from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. The new consensus protocol introduces novel vulnerabilities that warrant…
We compare the total capital efficiency of secure restaking and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocols. First, we consider the sufficient condition for the restaking graph to be secure. The condition implies that it is always possible to transform…
We analyze the economic incentives generated by the proof-of-stake mechanism discussed in the Ethereum Casper upgrade proposal. Compared with proof-of-work, proof-of-stake has a different cost structure for attackers. In Budish (2018),…
Blockchain like Bitcoin and Ethereum suffer from scalability issues. Sharding is one of the most promising and leading solutions to scale blockchain. The basic idea behind sharding is to divide the blockchain network into multiple…
This paper examines the economic and security implications of Proof-of-Stake (POS) designs, providing a survey of POS design choices and their underlying economic principles in prominent POS-blockchains. The paper argues that…
Voting methods weighted by stakes are the fundamental governance paradigm in Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains. Such a paradigm is known to be prone to power distortions: a few users possessing large stakes may completely control decision…
Temporary fork is a fundamental phenomenon in many blockchains with proof of work, and the analysis of temporary fork has recently drawn great attention. Different from existing efforts that focus on the blockchain system factors such as…
Decentralization is a key indicator for the evaluation of public blockchains. In the past, there have been very few studies on measuring and comparing the actual level of decentralization between Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains and…
Blockchain applications that rely on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) have increasingly become energy inefficient with a staggering carbon footprint. In contrast, energy-efficient alternative consensus protocols such as Proof-of-Stake (PoS) may…
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…
Blockchain as a promising technology is gaining its popularity ever since proof-of-work based Bitcoin came to the world. Nevertheless, Bitcoin achieves consensus at an expensive cost of energy. Proof-of-stake is one of the solutions for…