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The recent adoption of blockchain technologies and open permissionless networks suggest the importance of peer-to-peer atomic cross-chain transaction protocols. Users should be able to atomically exchange tokens and assets without depending…
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…
Options are fundamental to blockchain-based financial services, offering essential tools for risk management and price speculation, which enhance liquidity, flexibility, and market efficiency in decentralized finance (DeFi). Despite the…
This paper considers the problem of Byzantine fault-tolerance in multi-agent decentralized optimization. In this problem, each agent has a local cost function. The goal of a decentralized optimization algorithm is to allow the agents to…
Blockchains are maintained by a network of participants that run algorithms designed to maintain collectively a distributed machine tolerant to Byzantine attacks. From the point of view of users, blockchains provide the illusion of…
This paper presents a comprehensive refutation of the so-called "blockchain trilemma," a widely cited but formally ungrounded claim asserting an inherent trade-off between decentralisation, security, and scalability in blockchain protocols.…
Classic Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols forfeit liveness in the face of asynchrony in order to preserve safety, whereas most deployed blockchain protocols forfeit safety in order to remain live. In this work, we achieve the…
Byzantine fault tolerant protocols enable state replication in the presence of crashed, malfunctioning, or actively malicious processes. Designing such protocols without the assistance of verification tools, however, is remarkably…
Blockchain systems benefit from lessons in prior art such as fault tolerance, distributed systems, peer-to-peer systems, and game theory. In this paper we argue that blockchain algorithms should tolerate both rational (self-interested)…
Since the inception of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology have attracted an increasing interest from both academia and industry. Among various core components, consensus protocol is the defining technology…
Blockchains with smart contracts are distributed ledger systems that achieve block-state consistency among distributed nodes by only allowing deterministic operations of smart contracts. However, the power of smart contracts is enabled by…
We investigate a decentralised approach to committing transactions in a replicated database, under partial replication. Previous protocols either re-execute transactions entirely and/or compute a total order of transactions. In contrast,…
Decentralisation is one of the promises introduced by blockchain technologies: fair and secure interaction amongst peers with no dominant positions, single points of failure or censorship. Decentralisation, however, appears difficult to be…
The meteoric rise of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has been accompanied by a plethora of frequent and often financially devastating attacks on its protocols There have been over 70 exploits of DeFi protocols, with the total of lost funds…
Multiparty session types are designed to abstractly capture the structure of communication protocols and verify behavioural properties. One important such property is progress, i.e., the absence of deadlock. Distributed algorithms often…
With the advancement of blockchain technology, chained Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) protocols have been increasingly adopted in practical systems, making their performance a crucial aspect of the study. In this paper, we introduce a…
Permissionless blockchains offer an information environment where users can interact privately without fear of censorship. Financial services can be programmatically coded via smart contracts to automate transactions without the need for…
Blockchain is a disruptive technology intended at implementing secure decentralized distributed systems, in which transactional data can be shared, stored and verified by participants of a system using cryptographic and consensus…
To implement a blockchain, the trend is now to integrate a non-trivial Byzantine fault tolerant consensus algorithm instead of the seminal idea of waiting to receive blocks to decide upon the longest branch. After a decade of existence,…
A blockchain replaces central counterparties with time-consuming consensus protocols to record the transfer of ownership. This settlement latency slows cross-exchange trading, exposing arbitrageurs to price risk. Off-chain settlement,…