Related papers: Why Stake When You Can Borrow?
Blockchain plays a crucial role in ensuring the security and integrity of decentralized systems, with the proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism being fundamental for achieving distributed consensus. As PoW blockchains see broader adoption, an…
Blockchain technology has developed significantly over the last decade. One of the reasons for this is its sustainability architecture, which does not allow modification of the history of committed transactions. That means that developers…
Proof of work (PoW), the most popular consensus mechanism for Blockchain, requires ridiculously large amounts of energy but without any useful outcome beyond determining accounting rights among miners. To tackle the drawback of PoW, we…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi), a financial ecosystem without centralized controlling organization, has introduced a new paradigm for lending and borrowing. However, its capital efficiency remains constrained by the inability to effectively…
Proof-of-work (PoW) is an algorithmic tool used to secure networks by imposing a computational cost on participating devices. Unfortunately, traditional PoW schemes require that correct devices perform computational work perpetually, even…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) applications introduce novel financial instruments replicating and extending traditional ones through blockchain-based smart contracts. Among these applications, DeFi derivatives protocols enable the creation…
This study develops and analyzes an optimization model of smart contract adoption under bounded risk, linking structural theory with simulation and real-world validation. We examine how adoption intensity alpha is structurally pinned at a…
Smart contracts operate in a highly adversarial environment, where vulnerabilities can lead to substantial financial losses. Thus, smart contracts are subject to security audits. In auditing, proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits play a critical…
Decentralized finance introduces new business models and use cases as part of digital finance. Restaking has recently emerged as a transformative mechanism in DeFi, promising extra yields but introducing complex and interconnected risks.…
Proof of work (PoW), as the representative consensus protocol for blockchain, consumes enormous amounts of computation and energy to determine bookkeeping rights among miners but does not achieve any practical purposes. To address the…
Embodied AI systems, comprising AI models and physical plants, are increasingly prevalent across various applications. Due to the rarity of system failures, ensuring their safety in complex operating environments remains a major challenge,…
Since the Merge update upon which Ethereum transitioned to Proof of Stake, it has been touted that it resulted in lower power consumption and increased security. However, even if that is the case, can this state be sustained? In this paper,…
Experimentation involves risk. The investigator expends time and money in the pursuit of data that supports a hypothesis. In the end, the investigator may find that all of these costs were for naught and the data fail to reject the null.…
Blockchains, and specifically smart contracts, have promised to create fair and transparent trading ecosystems. Unfortunately, we show that this promise has not been met. We document and quantify the widespread and rising deployment of…
We present two attacks targeting the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum consensus protocol. The first attack suggests a fundamental conceptual incompatibility between PoS and the Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree (GHOST) fork choice paradigm…
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…
Mobile service providers (MSPs) are particularly vulnerable to roaming frauds, especially ones that exploit the long delay in the data exchange process of the contemporary roaming management systems, causing multi-billion dollars loss each…
In the PoS blockchain landscape, the challenge of achieving full decentralization is often hindered by a disproportionate concentration of staked tokens among a few validators. This study analyses this challenge by first formalizing…
Bitcoin is the first fully-decentralized permissionless blockchain protocol to achieve a high level of security, but at the expense of poor throughput and latency. Scaling the performance of Bitcoin has a been a major recent direction of…
In today's programmable blockchains, smart contracts are limited to being deterministic and non-probabilistic. This lack of randomness is a consequential limitation, given that a wide variety of real-world financial contracts, such as…