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Despite being under development for over 15 years, transaction throughput remains one of the key challenges confronting blockchains, which typically has a cap of a limited number of transactions per second. A fundamental factor limiting…
As distributed ledgers, blockchains run consensus protocols which trade capacity for consistency, especially in non-ideal networks with incomplete connectivity and erroneous links. Existing studies on the tradeoff between capacity and…
A blockchain is a database of sequential events that is maintained by a distributed group of nodes. A key consensus problem in blockchains is that of determining the next block (data element) in the sequence. Many blockchains address this…
Blockchain technologies are facing a scalability challenge, which must be overcome to guarantee a wider adoption of the technology. This scalability issue is due to the use of consensus algorithms to guarantee the total order of the chain…
Distributed ledgers are common in the industry. Some of them can use blockchains as their underlying infrastructure. A blockchain requires participants to agree on its contents. This can be achieved via a consensus protocol, and several BFT…
In the PoS blockchain landscape, the challenge of achieving full decentralization is often hindered by a disproportionate concentration of staked tokens among a few validators. This study analyses this challenge by first formalizing…
Smart contracts have enabled blockchain systems to evolve from simple cryptocurrency platforms, such as Bitcoin, to general transactional systems, such as Ethereum. Catering for emerging business requirements, a new architecture called…
Transaction throughput, confirmation latency and confirmation reliability are fundamental performance measures of any blockchain system in addition to its security. In a decentralized setting, these measures are limited by two underlying…
The emergence of more and more blockchain solutions with innovative approaches to optimising performance, scalability, privacy and governance complicates performance analysis. Reasons for the difficulty of benchmarking blockchains include,…
The popularization of blockchains leads to a resurgence of interest in Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) state machine replication protocols. However, much of the work on this topic focuses on the underlying consensus protocols, with emphasis…
Decentralization is a foundational principle of permissionless blockchains, with consensus mechanisms serving a critical role in its realization. This study quantifies the decentralization of consensus mechanisms in proof-of-stake (PoS)…
Collaborative content generation (CCG) enables collective creation of artifacts like scientific articles. Quality is a paramount concern in CCG, and a multitude of methods have been proposed to evaluate the quality of artifacts.…
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…
We present the notion of multilevel slashing, where proof-of-stake blockchain validators can obtain gradual levels of assurance that a certain block is bound to be finalized in a global consensus procedure, unless an increasing and…
This paper proposes a random network model for blockchains, a distributed hierarchical data structure of blocks that has found several applications in various industries. The model is parametric on two probability distribution functions…
Blockchains rely on a consensus among participants to achieve decentralization and security. However, reaching consensus in an online, digital world where identities are not tied to physical users is a challenging problem. Proof-of-work…
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…
Bitcoin is the most successful cryptocurrency so far. This is mainly due to its novel consensus algorithm, which is based on proof-of-work combined with a cryptographically-protected data structure and a rewarding scheme that incentivizes…
Bitcoin is the first successful decentralized global digital cash system. Its mining process requires intense computational resources, therefore its usefulness remains a disputable topic. We aim to solve three problems with Bitcoin and…
Blockchain technology is among the fastest-growing technologies in the world today. It has been adopted in diverse areas but mostly in financial systems, such as Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Therefore, it is a niche that has attracted interest…