Related papers: LightSync: Ultra Light Client for PoW Blockchains
Bitcoin's success as a cryptocurrency enabled it to penetrate into many daily life transactions. Its problems regarding the transaction fees and long validation times are addressed through an innovative concept called the Lightning Network…
The proliferation of resource-constrained devices has become prevalent across various digital applications, including smart homes, smart healthcare, and smart transportation, among others. However, the integration of these devices brings…
The Lightning Network, known for its millisecond settlement speeds and low transaction fees, offers a compelling alternative to traditional payment processors, which often have higher fees and longer processing times. This is particularly…
Clients of permissionless blockchain systems, like Bitcoin, rely on an underlying peer-to-peer network to send and receive transactions. It is critical that a client is connected to at least one honest peer, as otherwise the client can be…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) such as the Lightning Network offer an appealing solution to the scalability problem faced by many cryptocurrencies operating on a blockchain such as Bitcoin. However, PCNs also inherit the stringent…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is applied in various fields, and the number of physical devices connected to the IoT is increasingly growing. There are significant challenges to the IoT's growth and development, mainly due to the centralized…
Blockchains have a two-sided reputation: they are praised for disrupting some of our institutions through innovative technology for good, yet notorious for being slow and expensive to use. In this work, we tackle this issue with…
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…
To address the large amount of energy wasted by blockchains, we propose a decentralized consensus protocol for blockchains in which the computation can be used to search for good approximate solutions to any optimization problem. Our…
Lightning Network (LN) addresses the scalability problem of Bitcoin by leveraging off-chain transactions. Nevertheless, it is not possible to run LN on resource-constrained IoT devices due to its storage, memory, and processing…
Payment Channel Networks (PCNs) have been proposed as an alternative solution to the scalability, throughput, and cost overhead problems associated with blockchain transactions. By facilitating offchain execution of transactions, PCNs…
Permissioned blockchains promise secure decentralized data management in business-to-business use-cases. In contrast to Bitcoin and similar public blockchains which rely on Proof-of-Work for consensus and are deployed on thousands of…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) are a promising technology that alleviates blockchain scalability by shifting the transaction load from the blockchain to the PCN. Nevertheless, the network topology has to be carefully designed to maximise…
Popular Ethereum wallets (like MetaMask) entrust centralized infrastructure providers (e.g., Infura) to run the consensus client logic on their behalf. As a result, these wallets are light-weight and high-performant, but come with security…
Existing blockchain networks are often large-scale, requiring transactions to be synchronized across the entire network to reach consensus. On-chain computations can be prohibitively expensive, making many CPU-intensive computations…
Popular distributed ledger technology (DLT) systems using proof-of-work (PoW) for Sybil attack resistance have extreme energy requirements, drawing stern criticism from academia, businesses, and the media. DLT systems building on…
While the large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) makes many new applications feasible, like Smart Cities, IoT also brings new concerns on data reliability, security, and privacy. The rapid evolution in blockchain technologies, which relied on…
An enormous amount of energy is wasted in Proofof-Work (PoW) mechanisms adopted by popular blockchain applications (e.g., PoW-based cryptocurrencies), because miners must conduct a large amount of computation. Owing to this, one serious…
A major challenge in blockchain sharding protocols is that more than 95% transactions are cross-shard. Not only those cross-shard transactions degrade the system throughput but also double the confirmation time, and exhaust an already…
Consensus mechanism is the core technology for blockchain to ensure that transactions are executed in sequence. It also determines the decentralization, security, and efficiency of blockchain. Existing mechanisms all have certain…