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Blockchain technologies have overturned the digital finance industry by introducing a decentralized pseudonymous means of monetary transfer. The pseudonymous nature introduced privacy concerns, enabling various deanonymization techniques,…
Centralization enhances the efficiency of Artificial Intelligence (AI) but also introduces critical challenges, including single points of failure, inherent biases, data privacy risks, and scalability limitations. To address these issues,…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is a system of financial products and services built and delivered through smart contracts on various blockchains. In the past year, DeFi has gained popularity and market capitalization. However, it has also…
Traditional blockchains grant the miner of a block full control not only over which transactions but also their order. This constitutes a major flaw discovered with the introduction of decentralized finance and allows miners to perform MEV…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) on Ethereum has undergone significant transformations since its emergence during the DeFi summer of 2020. With the introduction of Proof of Stake (PoS) and Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS), the transaction…
With the advent of decentralised digital currencies powered by blockchain technology, a new era of peer-to-peer transactions has commenced. The rapid growth of the cryptocurrency economy has led to increased use of transaction-enabling…
Blockchains, and specifically smart contracts, have promised to create fair and transparent trading ecosystems. Unfortunately, we show that this promise has not been met. We document and quantify the widespread and rising deployment of…
Distributed ledger systems, such as blockchains, rely on consensus protocols that commit ordered messages for processing. In practice, message ordering within these systems is often reward-driven. This raises concerns about fairness,…
Decentralized finance revolutionizes traditional financial systems by leveraging blockchain technology to reduce trust. However, some vulnerabilities persist, notably front-running by malicious actors who exploit transaction information to…
Blockchain systems come with a promise of decentralization that often stumbles on a roadblock when key decisions about modifying the software codebase need to be made. This is attested by the fact that both of the two major…
Rollups have emerged as a promising solution to enhance blockchain scalability, offering increased throughput, reduced latency, and lower transaction fees. However, they currently rely on a centralized sequencer to determine transaction…
We study a new "laminated" queueing model for orders on batched trading venues such as decentralised exchanges. The model aims to capture and generalise transaction queueing infrastructure that has arisen to organise MEV activity on public…
Liquid staking and restaking represent recent innovations in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) that garnered user interest and capital. Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs), tokenized representations of staked tokens on Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains,…
Stablecoins have emerged as a rapidly growing digital payment instrument, raising the question of whether blockchain-based settlement can function as a substitute for incumbent card networks in retail payments. This Systematization of…
As an integral part of the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) with automated market maker (AMM) protocols have gained massive traction with the recently revived interest in blockchain and distributed…
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…
Blockchains offer strong security guarantees, but they cannot protect the ordering of transactions. Powerful players, such as miners, sequencers, and sophisticated bots, can reap significant profits by selectively including, excluding, or…
Lending protocols in decentralized finance enable the permissionless exchange of capital from lenders to borrowers without relying on a trusted third party for clearing or market-making. Interest rates are set by the supply and demand of…
The rise of Decentralized Finance ("DeFi") on the Ethereum blockchain has enabled the creation of lending platforms, which serve as marketplaces to lend and borrow digital currencies. We first categorize the activity of lending platforms…
The rapid growth of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) boosts the Ethereum ecosystem. At the same time, attacks towards DeFi applications (apps) are increasing. However, to the best of our knowledge, existing smart contract vulnerability…