Related papers: Wendy, the Good Little Fairness Widget
Voting algorithms have been widely used as consensus protocols in the realization of fault-tolerant systems. These algorithms are best suited for distributed systems of nodes with low computational power or heterogeneous networks, where…
Blockchains offer strong security gurarantees, but cannot protect users against the ordering of transactions. Players such as miners, bots and validators can reorder various transactions and reap significant profits, called the Maximal…
Permisionless decentralized ledgers ("blockchains") such as the one underlying the cryptocurrency Bitcoin allow anonymous participants to maintain the ledger, while avoiding control or "censorship" by any single entity. In contrast,…
We introduce the Condorcet attack, a new threat to fair transaction ordering. Specifically, the attack undermines batch-order-fairness, the strongest notion of transaction fair ordering proposed to date. The batch-order-fairness guarantees…
Blockchain consensus is a state whereby each node in a network agrees on the current state of the blockchain. Existing protocols achieve consensus via a contest or voting procedure to select one node as a dictator to propose new blocks.…
Most public blockchain protocols, including the popular Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, do not formally specify the order in which miners should select transactions from the pool of pending (or uncommitted) transactions for inclusion in…
Blockchain is a novel technology that is rising a lot of interest in the industrial and re- search sectors because its properties of decentralisation, immutability and data integrity. Initially, the underlying consensus mechanism has been…
Avalanche is a blockchain consensus protocol with exceptionally low latency and high throughput. This has swiftly established the corresponding token as a top-tier cryptocurrency. Avalanche achieves such remarkable metrics by substituting…
Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus forms the foundation of many modern blockchains striving for both high throughput and low latency. A growing bottleneck is transaction execution and validation on the critical path of consensus,…
Committee-based blockchains are among the most popular alternatives of proof-of-work based blockchains, such as Bitcoin. They provide strong consistency (no fork) under classical assumptions, and avoid using energy-consuming mechanisms to…
Lending protocols are one of the main applications of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), enabling crypto-assets loan markets with a total value estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. Unlike traditional lending systems, these protocols…
Many classical blockchains are known to have an embarrassingly low transaction throughput, down to Bitcoin's notorious seven transactions per second limit.Various proposals and implementations for increasing throughput emerged in the first…
Mechanisms for decentralized finance on blockchains suffer from various problems, including suboptimal price execution for users, latency, and a worse user experience compared to their centralized counterparts. Recently, off-chain…
Permissionless blockchain consensus protocols have been designed primarily for defining decentralized economies for the commercial trade of assets, both virtual and physical, using cryptocurrencies. In most instances, the assets being…
With the rapid growth of hyperconnected devices and decentralized data architectures, safeguarding Internet of Things (IoT) transactions is becoming increasingly challenging. Blockchain presents a promising solution, yet its effectiveness…
Consider a set of parties invited to execute a protocol $\Pi$. The protocol will incur some cost to run while in the end (or at regular intervals), it will populate and update local tables that assign (virtual) rewards to participants. Each…
We identify a subtle security issue that impacts the design of smart contracts, because agents may themselves deploy smart contracts (side contracts). Typically, equilibria of games are analyzed in vitro, under the assumption that players…
While blockchains initially gained popularity in the realm of cryptocurrencies, their widespread adoption is expanding beyond conventional applications, driven by the imperative need for enhanced data security. Despite providing a secure…
The successive generations of consensus algorithms have progressively shifted the performance bottleneck of blockchains to the execution layer. While recent works address this by parallelizing transaction execution, they often overlook the…
Trading on decentralized exchanges has been one of the primary use cases for permissionless blockchains with daily trading volume exceeding billions of U.S.~dollars. In the status quo, users broadcast transactions and miners are responsible…