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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…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains have emerged as a robust and effective consensus mechanism in open environments, leading to widespread deployment with numerous cryptocurrency platforms and substantial investments. However, the commonly…
This paper opts to mitigate the energy-inefficiency of the Blockchain Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm by rationally repurposing the power spent during the mining process. The original PoW mining scheme is designed to consider one…
Smart contracts have enabled blockchain systems to evolve from simple cryptocurrency platforms, such as Bitcoin, to general transactional systems, such as Ethereum. Catering for emerging business requirements, a new architecture called…
Most current blockchains require all full nodes to execute all tasks limits the throughput of existing blockchains, which are well documented and among the most significant hurdles for the widespread adoption of decentralized technology.…
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…
Bitcoin blockchain uses hash-based Proof-of-Work (PoW) that prevents unwanted participants from hogging the network resources. Anyone entering the mining game has to prove that they have expended a specific amount of computational power.…
Permissioned blockchains are becoming popular as data management systems in the enterprise setting. Compared to traditional distributed databases, blockchain platforms provide increased security guarantees but significantly lower…
Authorization is challenging in distributed systems that cannot rely on the identification of nodes. Proof-of-work offers an alternative gate-keeping mechanism, but its probabilistic nature is incompatible with conventional security…
Blockchain systems are designed to produce blocks at a constant average rate. The most popular systems currently employ a Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm as a means of creating these blocks. Bitcoin produces, on average, one block every 10…
With the rapid development of blockchain, Byzantine fault-tolerant protocols have attracted revived interest recently. To overcome the theoretical bounds of Byzantine fault tolerance, many protocols attempt to use Trusted Execution…
In the white book of Bitcion, Satoshi Nakamoto described a bitcoin system that can realize point-to-point online payment without a third-party organization. After supporting this magical application scenario and subverting the traditional…
Consensus mechanism is the core technology for blockchain to ensure that transactions are executed in sequence. It also determines the decentralization, security, and efficiency of blockchain. Existing mechanisms all have certain…
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…
A key performance metric in blockchains is the latency between when a transaction is broadcast and when it is confirmed (the so-called, confirmation latency). While improvements in consensus techniques can lead to lower confirmation…
As transaction fees skyrocket today, blockchains become increasingly expensive, hurting their adoption in broader applications. This work tackles the saving of transaction fees for economic blockchain applications. The key insight is that…
A smart contract on a blockchain cannot keep a secret because its data is replicated on all nodes in a network. To remedy this problem, it has been suggested to combine blockchains with trusted execution environments (TEEs), such as Intel…
The Ethereum Improvement Proposal 3675 (EIP-3675) marks a significant shift, transitioning from a Proof of Work (PoW) to a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. This transition resulted in a staggering 99.95% decrease in energy…
The perpetual growth of data stored on popular blockchains such as Ethereum leads to significant scalability challenges and substantial storage costs for operators of full nodes. Increasing costs may lead to fewer independently operated…
Proof of Work (PoW) is a Sybil-deterrence security mechanism. It introduces an external cost to a system by requiring computational effort to perform actions. However, since its inception, a central challenge was to tune this cost. Initial…