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Ponzi schemes are financial frauds which lure users under the promise of high profits. Actually, users are repaid only with the investments of new users joining the scheme: consequently, a Ponzi scheme implodes soon after users stop joining…
Modern blockchains, such as Ethereum, enable the execution of so-called smart contracts - programs that are executed across a decentralised network of nodes. As smart contracts become more popular and carry more value, they become more of…
The NFT ecosystem represents an interconnected, decentralized environment that encompasses the creation, distribution, and trading of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), where key actors, such as marketplaces, sellers, and buyers, utilize smart…
This thesis presents techniques to investigate transactions in uncharted cryptocurrencies and services. Cryptocurrencies are used to securely send payments online. Payments via the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, use pseudonymous addresses…
Smart contracts are computer programs that can be consistently executed by a network of mutually distrusting nodes, without the arbitration of a trusted authority. Because of their resilience to tampering, smart contracts are appealing in…
Ethereum is currently the second largest blockchain by market capitalization and a popular platform for cryptocurrencies. As it has grown, the high value present and the anonymity afforded by the technology have led Ethereum to become a…
Ethereum smart contracts are highly powerful, immutable, and able to retain massive amounts of tokens. However, smart contracts keep attracting attackers to benefit from smart contract flaws and Ethereum unexpected behavior. Thus,…
The rise of smart contract systems such as Ethereum has resulted in a proliferation of blockchain-based decentralized applications including applications that store and manage a wide range of data. Current smart contracts are designed to be…
Cryptocurrency has seen an explosive growth in recent years, thanks to the evolvement of blockchain technology and its economic ecosystem. Besides Bitcoin, thousands of cryptocurrencies have been distributed on blockchains, while hundreds…
The rapid advancement of blockchain technology has precipitated the widespread adoption of Ethereum and smart contracts across a variety of sectors. However, this has also given rise to numerous fraudulent activities, with many speculators…
Smart contract is the building block of blockchain systems that enables automated peer-to-peer transactions and decentralized services. With the increasing popularity of smart contracts, blockchain systems, in particular Ethereum, have been…
Recently, blockchain technology has become a topic in the spotlight but also a hotbed of various cybercrimes. Among them, phishing scams on blockchain have been found making a notable amount of money, thus emerging as a serious threat to…
With the rapid growth of blockchain, an increasing number of users have been attracted and many implementations have been refreshed in different fields. Especially in the cryptocurrency investment field, blockchain technology has shown…
The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is a decentralized computing engine. It enables the Ethereum blockchain to execute smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps). The increasing adoption of Ethereum sparked the rise of phishing…
Ethereum prospered the inception of a plethora of smart contract applications, ranging from gambling games to decentralized finance. However, Ethereum is also considered a highly adversarial environment, where vulnerable smart contracts…
Modern cryptocurrency systems, such as Ethereum, permit complex financial transactions through scripts called smart contracts. These smart contracts are executed many, many times, always without real concurrency. First, all smart contracts…
Ethereum has emerged as a dynamic platform for exchanging cryptocurrency tokens. While token crowdsales cannot simultaneously guarantee buyers both certainty of valuation and certainty of participation, we show that if each token buyer…
Since it takes time and effort to put a new product or service on the market, one would like to predict whether it will be a success. In general this is not possible, but it is possible to follow best practices in order to maximise the…
There are various types of pyramid schemes which have inflicted or are inflicting losses on many people in the world. We propose a pyramid scheme model which has the principal characters of many pyramid schemes appeared in recent years:…
Scam contracts on Ethereum have rapidly evolved alongside the rise of DeFi and NFT ecosystems, utilizing increasingly complex code obfuscation techniques to avoid early detection. This paper systematically investigates how obfuscation…