Related papers: Wendy, the Good Little Fairness Widget
The blockchain has found numerous applications in many areas with the expectation to significantly enhance their security. The Internet of things (IoT) constitutes a prominent application domain of blockchain, with a number of architectures…
In this paper, we consider the problem of generating fair randomness in a deterministic, multi-agent context (for instance, a decentralised game built on a blockchain). The existing state-of-the-art approaches are either susceptible to…
Permissionless blockchains offer many advantages but also have significant limitations including high latency. This prevents their use in important scenarios such as retail payments, where merchants should approve payments fast. Prior works…
Edge computing draws a lot of recent research interests because of the performance improvement by offloading many workloads from the remote data center to nearby edge nodes. Nonetheless, one open challenge of this emerging paradigm lies in…
Blockchains offer a decentralized and secure execution environment strong enough to host cryptocurrencies, but the state-replication model makes on-chain computation expensive. To avoid heavy on-chain workloads, systems like Truebit and…
We propose a novel consensus protocol based on a hybrid approach, that combines a directed acyclic graph (DAG) and a classical chain of blocks. This architecture allows us to enforce collective block construction, minimising the…
Witnet is a decentralized oracle network (DON) that connects smart contracts to the outer world. Generally speaking, it allows any piece of software to retrieve the contents published at any web address at a certain point in time, with…
Proof of Stake (PoS) protocols rely on voting mechanisms to reach consensus on the current state. If an enhanced majority of staking nodes, also called validators, agree on a proposed block, then this block is appended to the blockchain.…
Blockchain systems run consensus rules as code to agree on the state of the distributed ledger and secure the network. Changing these rules can be risky and challenging. In addition, it can often be controversial and take much effort to…
Blockchain is an emerging decentralized data collection, sharing and storage technology, which have provided abundant transparent, secure, tamper-proof, secure and robust ledger services for various real-world use cases. Recent years have…
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies prioritize transactions based on their fees, creating a unique kind of fee market. Empirically, this market has failed to yield stable equilibria with predictable prices for desired levels of service. We…
Trust models are essential components of networks of any nature, as they refer to confidence frameworks to evaluate and verify if their participants act reliably and fairly. They are necessary to any social, organizational, or computer…
Recent attention on secure multiparty computation and blockchain technology has garnered new interest in developing auction protocols in a decentralized setting. In this paper, we propose a secure and private Vickrey auction protocol that…
Given the parallels between game theory and consensus, it makes sense to intelligently design blockchain or DAG protocols with an incentive-compatible-first mentality. To that end, we propose a new blockchain or DAG protocol enhancement…
As an emerging decentralized secure data management platform, blockchain has gained much popularity recently. To maintain a canonical state of blockchain data record, proof-of-work based consensus protocols provide the nodes, referred to as…
Transaction fees represent a major incentive in many blockchain systems as a way to incentivize processing transactions. Unfortunately, they also introduce an enormous amount of incentive asymmetry compared to alternatives like fixed block…
Blockchain technology enables stakeholders to conduct trusted data sharing and exchange without a trusted centralized institution. These features make blockchain applications attractive to enhance trustworthiness in very different contexts.…
Blockchain systems often employ proof-of-work consensus protocols to validate and add transactions into hashchains. These protocols stimulate competition among miners in solving cryptopuzzles (e.g. SHA-256 hash computation in Bitcoin) in…
Blockchain technology is among the fastest-growing technologies in the world today. It has been adopted in diverse areas but mostly in financial systems, such as Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Therefore, it is a niche that has attracted interest…
Smart contract-enabled blockchains allow building decentralized applications in which mutually-distrusted parties can work together. Recently, oracle services emerged to provide these applications with real-world data feeds. Unfortunately,…