Related papers: Wendy, the Good Little Fairness Widget
Edge computing is a distributed computing paradigm that relies on computational resources of end devices in a network to bring benefits such as low bandwidth utilization, responsiveness, scalability and privacy preservation. Applications…
Since the inception of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology have attracted an increasing interest from both academia and industry. Among various core components, consensus protocol is the defining technology…
Fairness is an important trait of open, free markets. Ethereum is a platform meant to enable digital, decentralized markets. Though many researchers debate the market's fairness, there are few discussions around the fairness of automated…
To address the large amount of energy wasted by blockchains, we propose a decentralized consensus protocol for blockchains in which the computation can be used to search for good approximate solutions to any optimization problem. Our…
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…
The paper presents Tendermint, a new protocol for ordering events in a distributed network under adversarial conditions. More commonly known as Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus or atomic broadcast, the problem has attracted…
Blockchains use peer-to-peer networks for disseminating information among peers, but these networks currently do not have any provable guarantees for desirable properties such as Byzantine fault tolerance, good connectivity and small…
Lower bounds and impossibility results in distributed computing are both intellectually challenging and practically important. Hundreds if not thousands of proofs appear in the literature, but surprisingly, the vast majority of them apply…
Clustering algorithms are widely used in many societal resource allocation applications, such as loan approvals and candidate recruitment, among others, and hence, biased or unfair model outputs can adversely impact individuals that rely on…
Modern blockchains increasingly adopt multi-proposer (MCP) consensus to remove single-leader bottlenecks and improve censorship resistance. However, MCP alone does not resolve how users should disseminate transactions to proposers. Today,…
Modern blockchains increasingly rely on parallel execution to improve throughput. We show several industry and academic transaction fee mechanisms (TFMs) struggle to simultaneously account for execution parallelism while remaining…
We examine blockchain technologies, especially smart contracts, as a platform for decentralized applications. By providing a basis for consensus, blockchain promises to upend business models that presuppose a central authority. However,…
We develop several innovations to bring the best practices of traditional investment funds to the blockchain landscape. Specifically, we illustrate how: 1) fund prices can be updated regularly like mutual funds; 2) performance fees can be…
Existing fair exchange protocols usually neglect consideration of cost when assessing their fairness. However, in an environment with non-negligible transaction cost, e.g., public blockchains, high or unexpected transaction cost might be an…
In the context of decentralized blockchains, accurately simulating the outcome of order flow auctions (OFAs) off-chain is challenging due to adversarial sequencing, encrypted bids, and frequent state changes. Existing approaches, such as…
A blockchain replaces central counterparties with time-consuming consensus protocols to record the transfer of ownership. This settlement latency slows cross-exchange trading, exposing arbitrageurs to price risk. Off-chain settlement,…
We study the problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods to groups of agents. Agents in the same group share the same set of goods even though they may have different preferences. Previous work has focused on unanimous fairness, in which…
Blockchain technology has revolutionized the digital landscape, driving innovations across industries through its decentralized and transparent infrastructure. These networks are primarily categorized as public or private, based on user…
Sneakers were designated as the most counterfeited fashion item online, with three times more risk in a trade than any other fashion purchase. As the market expands, the current sneaker scene displays several vulnerabilities and trust…
This thesis proposes techniques aiming to make blockchain technologies and smart contract platforms practical by improving their scalability, latency, and privacy. This thesis starts by presenting the design and implementation of…