Related papers: Babel Fees via Limited Liabilities
Blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum execute payment transactions securely, but their performance is limited by the need for global consensus. Payment networks overcome this limitation through off-chain transactions. Instead of writing…
Ethereum clients execute transactions in a sequential order prescribed by the consensus protocol. This is a safe and conservative approach to blockchain transaction processing which forgoes running transactions in parallel even when doing…
We study selfish mining in Ethereum. The problem is combinatorially more complex than in Bitcoin because of major differences in the reward system and a different difficulty adjustment formula. Equivalent strategies in Bitcoin do have…
One of the defining features of a cryptocurrency is that its ledger, containing all transactions that have evertaken place, is globally visible. As one consequenceof this degree of transparency, a long line of recent re-search has…
The internet era has generated a requirement for low cost, anonymous and rapidly verifiable transactions to be used for online barter, and fast settling money have emerged as a consequence. For the most part, e-money has fulfilled this…
We put forward the idea that classical blockchains and smart contracts are potentially useful primitives not only for classical cryptography, but for quantum cryptography as well. Abstractly, a smart contract is a functionality that allows…
Bitcoin transaction fees will become more important as the block subsidy declines, but fee formation is hard to study with blockchain data alone because the relevant queueing environment is unobserved. We develop and estimate a structural…
The Bitcoin payment system involves two agent types: Users that transact with the currency and pay fees and miners in charge of authorizing transactions and securing the system in return for these fees. Two of Bitcoin's challenges are (i)…
Participation in permissionless blockchains results in competition over system resources, which needs to be controlled with fees. Ethereum's current fee mechanism is implemented via a first-price auction that results in unpredictable fees…
Payment channel networks are supposed to overcome technical scalability limitations of blockchain infrastructure by employing a special overlay network with fast payment confirmation and only sporadic settlement of netted transactions on…
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…
Due to the widespread use of smart contracts, Ethereum has become the second-largest blockchain platform after Bitcoin. Many different types of Ethereum accounts (ICO, Mining, Gambling, etc.) also have quite active trading activities on…
Decentralized blockchain platforms have enabled the secure exchange of crypto-assets without the intermediation of trusted authorities. To this purpose, these platforms rely on a peer-to-peer network of byzantine nodes, which…
The Enterprise Ethereum Client Specification by the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance defines the requirements which Ethereum Clients offering private smart contract capabilities should comply with. This specification though ground breaking,…
In this paper we show that, using only mild assumptions, previously proposed multidimensional blockchain fee markets are essentially optimal, even against worst-case adversaries. In particular, we show that the average welfare gap between…
Unlike Ethereum, which was conceived as a general-purpose smart-contract platform, Bitcoin was designed primarily as a transaction ledger for its native currency, which limits programmability for conditional applications. This constraint is…
This paper develops a model to evaluate the viability of blockchain markets as the sole venue for price formation. Blockchains clear at discrete intervals called block time, and transactions are executed sequentially according to priority…
This paper investigates how pricing schemes can achieve efficient allocations in blockchain systems featuring multiple transaction queues under a global capacity constraint. I model a capacity-constrained blockchain where users submit…
The CAP theorem says that no blockchain can be live under dynamic participation and safe under temporary network partitions. To resolve this availability-finality dilemma, we formulate a new class of flexible consensus protocols,…
We develop a general and practical framework to address the problem of the optimal design of dynamic fee mechanisms for multiple blockchain resources. Our framework allows to compute policies that optimally trade-off between adjusting…