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Permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin have long been criticized for their high computational and storage overhead. Unfortunately, while a number of proposals address the energy consumption of existing Proof-of-Work deployments, little…
In the context of blockchain systems, the importance of decentralization is undermined by the lack of a widely accepted methodology to measure it. To address this gap, we set out a systematization effort targeting the decentralization…
With the rise of cryptocurrencies, many new applications built on decentralized blockchains have emerged. Blockchains are full-stack distributed systems where multiple sub-systems interact. While many deployed blockchains and decentralized…
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…
The paper examines decentralized cryptocurrency protocols that are based on the use of internal tokens as identity tools. An analysis of security problems with popular Proof-of-stake consensus protocols is provided. A new protocol,…
This paper extends the blockchain sustainability framework of Budish (2018) to consider proof of stake (in addition to proof of work) consensus mechanisms and permissioned (where the number of nodes are fixed) networks. It is demonstrated…
Decentralized finance revolutionizes traditional financial systems by leveraging blockchain technology to reduce trust. However, some vulnerabilities persist, notably front-running by malicious actors who exploit transaction information to…
Trading on decentralized exchanges has been one of the primary use cases for permissionless blockchains with daily trading volume exceeding billions of U.S.~dollars. In the status quo, users broadcast transactions and miners are responsible…
This paper investigates how pricing schemes can achieve efficient allocations in blockchain systems featuring multiple transaction queues under a global capacity constraint. I model a capacity-constrained blockchain where users submit…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism is popular among current blockchain systems, which leads to an increasing concern about the tremendous waste of energy due to massive meaningless computation. To address this issue, we propose a novel…
Recently, the blockchain technique was put in the spotlight as it introduced a systematic approach for multiple parties to reach consensus without needing trust. However, the application of this technique in practice is severely restricted…
Blockchain is a type of decentralized distributed network which acts as an immutable digital ledger. Despite the absence of any central governing authority to validate the blocks in the ledger, it is considered secure and immutable due to…
Decentralized data markets gather data from many contributors to create a joint data cooperative governed by market stakeholders. The ability to perform secure computation on decentralized data markets would allow for useful insights to be…
This paper presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of two dominant blockchain consensus mechanisms, Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS), evaluated across seven critical metrics: energy use, security, transaction speed,…
Modern applications often operate on data in multiple administrative domains. In this federated setting, participants may not fully trust each other. These distributed applications use transactions as a core mechanism for ensuring…
Transaction throughput, confirmation latency and confirmation reliability are fundamental performance measures of any blockchain system in addition to its security. In a decentralized setting, these measures are limited by two underlying…
Blockchain systems come with the promise of being inclusive for a variety of decentralized applications (DApps) that can serve different purposes and have different urgency requirements. Despite this, the transaction fee mechanisms…
Game theory is often used as a tool to analyze decentralized systems and their properties, in particular, blockchains. In this note, we take the opposite view. We argue that blockchains can and should be used to implement economic…
Decentralisation is one of the promises introduced by blockchain technologies: fair and secure interaction amongst peers with no dominant positions, single points of failure or censorship. Decentralisation, however, appears difficult to be…
We study efficiency in a proof-of-work blockchain with non-zero latencies, focusing in particular on the (inequality in) individual miners' efficiencies. Prior work attributed differences in miners' efficiencies mostly to attacks, but we…