Related papers: Why Stake When You Can Borrow?
We study decentralized cryptocurrency protocols in which the participants do not deplete physical scarce resources. Such protocols commonly rely on Proof of Stake, i.e., on mechanisms that extend voting power to the stakeholders of the…
Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchains offer promising alternatives to traditional Proof of Work (PoW) systems, providing scalability and energy efficiency. However, blockchains operate in a decentralized manner and the network is composed of…
Permissionless Proof-of-Stake (PoS) economic security is predicated on the high cost of violating consensus safety or liveness. We show that liquid staking introduces additional risks that are not captured by standard PoS economic security…
Liquid staking has become the largest category of decentralized finance protocols in terms of total value locked. However, few studies exist on its implementation designs or underlying risks. The liquid staking protocols allow for earning…
The idea of security sharing goes back to Nakamoto's introduction of merge mining, a technique that enables Bitcoin miners to reuse their hash power to bootstrap and secure other Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains. However, with the rise of…
Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain systems, especially those that allow stakeholders to organize themselves in ``stake-pools'', have emerged as a compelling paradigm for the deployment of large scale distributed ledgers. A stake-pool operates…
As of July 15, 2023, Ethererum, which is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain [1] has around 410 Billion USD in total assets on chain (popularly referred to as total-value-locked, TVL) but has only 33 Billion USD worth of ETH staked in…
With the increasing adoption of decentralized information systems based on a variety of permissionless blockchain networks, the choice of consensus mechanism is at the core of many controversial discussions. Ethereum's recent transition…
Fault-tolerant distributed systems move the trust in a single party to a majority of parties participating in the protocol. This makes blockchain based crypto-currencies possible: they allow parties to agree on a total order of transactions…
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…
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…
Bitcoin is the most secure blockchain in the world, supported by the immense hash power of its Proof-of-Work miners. Proof-of-Stake chains are energy-efficient, have fast finality but face several security issues: susceptibility to…
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…
This paper is concerned with the stability of shares in a cryptocurrency where the new coins are issued according to the Proof of Stake protocol. We identify large, medium and small investors under various rewarding schemes, and show that…
Proof-of-stake (PoS) has emerged as a natural alternative to the resource-intensive Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchain, as was recently seen with the Ethereum Merge. PoS-based blockchains require an initial stake distribution among the…
Liquid staking and restaking represent recent innovations in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) that garnered user interest and capital. Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs), tokenized representations of staked tokens on Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains,…
Financial markets are undergoing an unprecedented transformation. Technological advances have brought major improvements to the operations of financial services. While these advances promote improved accessibility and convenience,…
Blockchain technology has been gaining great interest from a variety of sectors, including healthcare, supply chain and cryptocurrencies. However, Blockchain suffers from its limited ability to scale (i.e. low throughput and high latency).…
Lending pools are decentralized applications which allow mutually untrusted users to lend and borrow crypto-assets. These applications feature complex, highly parametric incentive mechanisms to equilibrate the loan market. This complexity…
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…