Related papers: Stake Shift in Major Cryptocurrencies: An Empirica…
This paper describes a simulation study on security attacks over Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs). We specifically focus on attacks at the underlying peer-to-peer layer of these systems, that is in charge of disseminating messages…
Blockchain is a technology that provides a distributed ledger that stores previous records while maintaining consistency and security. Bitcoin is the first and largest decentralized electronic cryptographic system that uses blockchain…
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…
Decentralization has been touted as the principal security advantage which propelled blockchain systems at the forefront of developments in the financial technology space. Its exact semantics nevertheless remain highly contested and…
The Sybil attack plagues all peer-to-peer systems, and modern open distributed ledgers employ a number of tactics to prevent it from proof of work, or other resources such as space, stake or memory, to traditional admission control in…
Our work focuses on the design of a scalable permissionless blockchain in the proof-of-stake setting. In particular, we use a distributed hash table as a building block to set up randomized shards, and then leverage the sharded architecture…
Due to its minimal energy requirement the PoS consensus protocol has become an attractive alternative to PoW in modern cryptocurrencies. In this protocol the chance of being selected as a block proposer in each round is proportional to the…
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) run protocol governance by letting token holders vote on proposals. The dominant rule, voting power proportional to wallet balance, concentrates control among a small number of large holders,…
Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus protocols often face a trade-off between performance and security. Protocols that pre-elect leaders for subsequent rounds are vulnerable to Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, which can disrupt the network and…
Stablecoins have become significant assets in modern finance, with a market capitalization exceeding USD 246 billion (May 2025). Yet, despite their systemic importance, a comprehensive and risk-oriented understanding of crucial aspects like…
The wide success of Bitcoin has led to a huge surge of alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins). Most altcoins essentially fork Bitcoin's code with minor modifications, such as the number of coins to be minted, the block size, and the block…
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;…
Blockchains have witnessed widespread adoption in the past decade in various fields. The growing demand makes their scalability and sustainability challenges more evident than ever. As a result, more and more blockchains have begun to adopt…
Blockchain stores information into a chain of "blocks", whose integrity is usually guaranteed by Proof of Work (PoW). In many blockchain applications (including cryptocurrencies), users compete with each other to win the ownership of the…
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…
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,…
In this paper, we investigate the impact of reward schemes and committee sizes motivated by governance systems over blockchain communities. We introduce a model for elections with a binary outcome space where there is a ground truth (i.e.,…
Accountability, the ability to provably identify protocol violators, gained prominence as the main economic argument for the security of proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols. Rollups, the most popular scaling solution for blockchains, typically…
Transaction fee plays an important role in determining the priority of transaction processing in public blockchain systems. Owing to the observability of unconfirmed transactions, a strategic user can postpone his transaction broadcasting…
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…