Related papers: Sharding-Based Proof-of-Stake Blockchain Protocols…
Distributed ledger technology such as blockchain is considered essential for supporting large numbers of micro-transactions in the Machine Economy, which is envisioned to involve billions of connected heterogeneous and decentralized…
Blockchains are distributed systems, in which security is a critical factor for their success. However, despite their increasing popularity and adoption, there is a lack of standardized models that study blockchain-related security threats.…
A principal vulnerability of a proof-of-work ("PoW") blockchain is that an attacker can re-write the history of transactions by forking a previously published block and build a new chain segment containing a different sequence of…
Decentralization has been touted as the principal security advantage which propelled blockchain systems at the forefront of developments in the financial technology space. Its exact semantics nevertheless remain highly contested and…
As an emerging technology, blockchain has achieved great success in numerous application scenarios, from intelligent healthcare to smart cities. However, a long-standing bottleneck hindering its further development is the massive resource…
Bitcoin is the most secure blockchain in the world, supported by the immense hash power of its Proof-of-Work miners, but consumes huge amount of energy. Proof-of-Stake chains are energy-efficient, have fast finality and accountability, but…
Blockchain was mainly introduced for secure transactions in connection with the mining of cryptocurrency Bitcoin. This article discusses the fundamental concepts of blockchain technology and its components, such as block header,…
A good amount of effort has been dedicated to surveying and systematizing Ethereum smart contract security bug classes. There is, however, a gap in literature when it comes to surveying implementation-level security bugs that commonly occur…
Sharding is a promising blockchain scaling solution. But it currently suffers from high latency and low throughput when it comes to cross-shard transactions, i.e., transactions that require coordination from multiple shards. The root cause…
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…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains have emerged as a robust and effective consensus mechanism in open environments, leading to widespread deployment with numerous cryptocurrency platforms and substantial investments. However, the commonly…
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…
The blockchain initially gained traction in 2008 as the technology underlying bitcoin, but now has been employed in a diverse range of applications and created a global market worth over $150B as of 2017. What distinguishes blockchains from…
Many blockchain systems today, including Bitcoin, rely on Proof of Work (PoW). Proof of work is crucial to the liveness and security of cryptocurrencies. The assumption when using PoW is that a lot of trial and error is required on average…
Liquid staking has become the largest category of decentralized finance protocols in terms of total value locked. However, few studies exist on its implementation designs or underlying risks. The liquid staking protocols allow for earning…
The proof-of-work consensus protocol suffers from two main limitations: waste of energy and offering only probabilistic guarantees about the status of the blockchain. This paper introduces SklCoin, a new Byzantine consensus protocol and its…
Blockchain technology has developed significantly over the last decade. One of the reasons for this is its sustainability architecture, which does not allow modification of the history of committed transactions. That means that developers…
The Tangle-based structure becomes one of the most promising solutions when designing DAG-based blockchain systems. The approach improves the scalability by directly confirming multiple transactions in parallel instead of single blocks in…
While Proof-of-Work (PoW) is the most widely used consensus mechanism for blockchain, it received harsh criticism due to its massive waste of energy for meaningless hash calculation. Some studies have introduced Proof-of-Stake to address…
Scalability is a common issue among the most used permissionless blockchains, and several approaches have been proposed accordingly. As Ethereum is set to be a solid foundation for a decentralized Internet web, the need for tackling…