Related papers: Wendy, the Good Little Fairness Widget
The rise of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum has driven interest in blockchain database technology, with smart contracts enabling the growth of decentralized finance (DeFi). However, research has shown that adversaries exploit…
Blockchains revolutionized centralized sectors like banking and finance by promoting decentralization and transparency. In a blockchain, information is transmitted through transactions issued by participants or applications. Miners…
Traditional blockchain design gives miners or validators full control over transaction ordering, i.e., they can freely choose which transactions to include or exclude, as well as in which order. While not an issue initially, the emergence…
Leader-based protocols for consensus, i.e., atomic broadcast, allow some processes to unilaterally affect the final order of transactions. This has become a problem for blockchain networks and decentralized finance because it facilitates…
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…
Traditional blockchains grant the miner of a block full control not only over which transactions but also their order. This constitutes a major flaw discovered with the introduction of decentralized finance and allows miners to perform MEV…
Order fairness in distributed ledgers refers to properties that relate the order in which transactions are sent or received to the order in which they are eventually finalized, i.e., totally ordered. The study of such properties is…
Sharding is a prominent technique for scaling blockchains. By dividing the network into smaller components known as shards, a sharded blockchain can process transactions in parallel without introducing inconsistencies through the…
We construct a privacy-preserving, distributed and decentralized marketplace where parties can exchange data for tokens. In this market, buyers and sellers make transactions in a blockchain and interact with a third party, called notary,…
Tendermint-core blockchains (e.g. Cosmos) are considered today one of the most viable alternatives for the highly energy consuming proof-of-work blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Their particularity is that they aim at offering…
This paper presents a novel adversary model specifically tailored to distributed systems, aiming to assess the security of blockchain networks. Building upon concepts such as adversarial assumptions, goals, and capabilities, our proposed…
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,…
Distributed ledger systems, such as blockchains, rely on consensus protocols that commit ordered messages for processing. In practice, message ordering within these systems is often reward-driven. This raises concerns about fairness,…
This paper presents an adversary model and a simulation framework specifically tailored for analyzing attacks on distributed systems composed of multiple distributed protocols, with a focus on assessing the security of blockchain networks.…
Public blockchains group submitted transactions into batches, called blocks. A natural question is how to determine which transactions are included in these batches. In this note, we show a gap between the welfare of so-called `fair'…
Motivated by the great success and adoption of Bitcoin, a number of cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin, Dogecoin, and Ethereum are becoming increasingly popular. Although existing blockchain-based cryptocurrency schemes can ensure reasonable…
We study blockchain trade-intent auctions, which currently intermediate about USD 10 billion in trades each month. These auctions are combinatorial because executing multiple trade intents jointly generates additional efficiencies. However,…
Blockchain-based Distributed Ledgers (DLs) promise to transform the existing financial system by making it truly democratic. In the past decade, blockchain technology has seen many novel applications ranging from the banking industry to…
We propose LazyLedger, a design for distributed ledgers where the blockchain is optimised for solely ordering and guaranteeing the availability of transaction data. Responsibility for executing and validating transactions is shifted to only…
Although blockchains have become widely popular for their use in cryptocurrencies, they are now becoming pervasive as more traditional applications adopt blockchain to ensure data security. Despite being a secured network, blockchains have…