Related papers: Why Stake When You Can Borrow?
Current blockchain consensus protocols -- notably, Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) -- deliver global agreement but exhibit structural constraints. PoW anchors security in heavy computation, inflating energy use and imposing…
In this review, we evaluate the mechanisms behind the decentralized finance protocols for generating stable, passive income. Currently, such savings interest rates can be as high as 20% annually, payable in traditional currency values such…
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…
This paper presents a novel staking coopetition design aimed at incentivizing decentralization and continuous growth of economic security within a proof-of-stake system. Staking rewards follow a nonlinear mapping relative to stake size.…
Bitcoin uses blockchain technology and proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism where nodes spend computing resources and earn rewards in return for spending these resources. This incentive system has caused power to be significantly biased towards a…
Modern mathematics is built on the idea that proofs should be translatable into formal proofs, whose validity is an objective question, decidable by a computer. Yet, in practice, proofs are informal and may omit many details. An agent…
Decentralized finance (DeFi) has become one of the most successful applications of blockchain and smart contracts. The DeFi ecosystem enables a wide range of crypto-financial activities, while the underlying smart contracts often contain…
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…
The rise of Decentralized Finance ("DeFi") on the Ethereum blockchain has enabled the creation of lending platforms, which serve as marketplaces to lend and borrow digital currencies. We first categorize the activity of lending platforms…
Proof of Work (PoW) has extensively served as the foundation of blockchain's security, consistency, and tamper-resistance. However, long has it been criticized for its tremendous and inefficient utilization of computational power and…
While Proof-of-Work (PoW) is the most widely used consensus mechanism for blockchain, it received harsh criticism due to its massive waste of energy for meaningless hash calculation. Some studies have introduced Proof-of-Stake to address…
In the proof-of-stake (PoS) paradigm for maintaining decentralized, permissionless cryptocurrencies, Sybil attacks are prevented by basing the distribution of roles in the protocol execution on the stake distribution recorded in the ledger…
Proof-of-stake blockchain protocols are becoming one of the most promising alternatives to the energy-consuming proof-of-work protocols. However, one particularly critical threat in the PoS setting is the well-known long-range attacks…
A key component of security in decentralized blockchains is proof of opportunity cost among block producers. In the case of proof-of-work (PoW), currently used by the most prominent systems, the cost is due to spent computation. In this…
Popular Ethereum wallets (like MetaMask) entrust centralized infrastructure providers (e.g., Infura) to run the consensus client logic on their behalf. As a result, these wallets are light-weight and high-performant, but come with security…
Blockchain protocols implement total-order broadcast in a permissionless setting, where processes can freely join and leave. In such a setting, to safeguard against Sybil attacks, correct processes rely on cryptographic proofs tied to a…
The growth of the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem built on blockchain technology and smart contracts has led to an increased demand for secure and reliable smart contract development. However, attacks targeting smart contracts are…
Cryptocurrency has seen an explosive growth in recent years, thanks to the evolvement of blockchain technology and its economic ecosystem. Besides Bitcoin, thousands of cryptocurrencies have been distributed on blockchains, while hundreds…
Smart contracts are self-enforcing agreements that are employed to exchange assets without the approval of trusted third parties. This feature has encouraged various sectors to make use of smart contracts when transacting. Experience shows…
Decentralized applications are often composed of multiple interconnected smart contracts. This is especially evident in DeFi, where protocols are heavily intertwined and rely on a variety of basic building blocks such as tokens,…