Related papers: Wendy, the Good Little Fairness Widget
Game theory is often used as a tool to analyze decentralized systems and their properties, in particular, blockchains. In this note, we take the opposite view. We argue that blockchains can and should be used to implement economic…
Fair division is typically framed from a centralized perspective. However, in practice resource allocation often occurs via decentralized networks. We study a decentralized variant of fair division inspired by altruistic dynamics observed…
The Bitcoin cryptocurrency records its transactions in a public log called the blockchain. Its security rests critically on the distributed protocol that maintains the blockchain, run by participants called miners. Conventional wisdom…
Many protocols in distributed computing rely on a source of randomness, usually called a random beacon, both for their applicability and security. This is especially true for proof-of-stake blockchain protocols in which the next miner or…
Blockchain, Smart Contracts and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) are being touted to revolutionise digital services - through decentralisation. Cryptocurrencies, self-sovereign identities, decentralised certificate registries, and…
Transaction ordering attacks extract billions of dollars annually from decentralized finance users in the form of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV). Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols guarantee total order but place no…
The DFINITY blockchain computer provides a secure, performant and flexible consensus mechanism. At its core, DFINITY contains a decentralized randomness beacon which acts as a verifiable random function (VRF) that produces a stream of…
Recently emerging Decentralized Finance (DeFi) takes the promise of cryptocurrencies a step further, leveraging their decentralized networks to transform traditional financial products into trustless and transparent protocols that run…
Selfish mining is a well known vulnerability in blockchains exploited by miners to steal block rewards. In this paper, we explore a new form of selfish mining attack that guarantees high rewards with low cost. We show the feasibility of…
Low transaction throughput and poor scalability are significant issues in public blockchain consensus protocols such as Bitcoins. Recent research efforts in this direction have proposed shard-based consensus protocols where the key idea is…
Blockchain-based systems are frequently governed through tokens that grant their holders voting rights over core protocol functions and funds. The centralisation occurring in Decentralised Finance (DeFi) protocols' token-based voting…
Bribery is a perilous issue in the real world, especially in an economical aspect. This fraudulence is unavoidable, and more importantly, it is more difficult to trace in case smart contracts are utilized for bribing on a distributed public…
In the high-stakes race to develop more scalable blockchains, some platforms (Binance, Cosmos, EOS, TRON, etc.) have adopted committee-based consensus (CBC) protocols, whereby the blockchain's record-keeping rights are entrusted to a…
Censorship resilience is a fundamental assumption underlying the security of blockchain protocols. Additionally, the analysis of blockchain security from an economic and game theoretic perspective has been growing in popularity in recent…
The security of blockchain protocols is a combination of two properties: safety and liveness. It is well known that no blockchain protocol can provide both to sleepy (intermittently online) clients under adversarial majority. However,…
Blockchains are modern distributed systems that provide decentralized financial capabilities with trustable guarantees. Smart contracts are programs written in specialized programming languages running on a blockchain and govern how tokens…
Blockchain, the technology behind the popular Bitcoin, is considered a "security by design" system as it is meant to create security among a group of distrustful parties yet without a central trusted authority. The security of blockchain…
Lately, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), i.e., uniquely discernible assets on a blockchain, have skyrocketed in popularity by addressing a broad audience. However, the typical NFT auctioning procedures are conducted in various, ad hoc ways,…
A lot of business and research effort currently deals with the so called decentralised ledger technology blockchain. Putting it to use carries the tempting promise to make the intermediaries of social interactions superfluous and…
While online services emerge in all areas of life, the voting procedure in many democracies remains paper-based as the security of current online voting technology is highly disputed. We address the issue of trustworthy online voting…