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Despite the tremendous interest in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum today, many aspects of the underlying consensus protocols are poorly understood. Therefore, the search for protocols that improve either throughput or security…
Ethereum, a leading blockchain platform, has revolutionized the digital economy by enabling decentralized transactions and the execution of smart contracts. Ethereum transactions form the backbone of its network, facilitating peer-to-peer…
With the emergence of Miner Extractable Value (MEV), block construction markets on blockchains have evolved into a competitive arena. Following Ethereum's transition from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS), the Proposer Builder…
Modern blockchains increasingly rely on parallel execution to improve throughput. We show several industry and academic transaction fee mechanisms (TFMs) struggle to simultaneously account for execution parallelism while remaining…
This paper provides an overview of how crypto currency and blockchain engineering interacts with the law enforcement. We point out that a large proportion of crypto users are amateur investors and the dominant and the largest segment in…
We make several contributions that quantify the real-time hash rate and therefore the consensus of a blockchain. We show that by using only the hash value of blocks, we can estimate and measure the hash rate of all miners or individual…
In recent years, cryptocurrencies have attracted growing attention from both private investors and institutions. Among them, Bitcoin stands out for its impressive volatility and widespread influence. This paper explores the predictability…
Smart Contracts and transactions allow users to implement elaborate constructions on cryptocurrency blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Many of these constructions, including operational payment channels and atomic swaps, use a building…
This paper studies to what extent the cost of operating a proof-of-work blockchain is intrinsically linked to the cost of preventing attacks, and to what extent the underlying digital ledger security budgets are correlated with the…
In this paper, we identify a new form of attack, called the Balance attack, against proof-of-work blockchain systems. The novelty of this attack consists of delaying network communications between multiple subgroups of nodes with balanced…
Like any other useful technology, cryptocurrencies are sometimes used for criminal activities. While transactions are recorded on the blockchain, there exists a need for a more rapid and scalable method to detect addresses associated with…
In many blockchains, e.g., Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), the primary representation used for wallet addresses is a hardly memorable 40-digit hexadecimal string. As a result, users often select addresses from their recent transaction…
Blockchain is a distributed ledger, which is protected against malicious modifications by means of cryptographic tools, e.g. digital signatures and hash functions. One of the most prominent applications of blockchains is cryptocurrencies,…
Given the large adoption and economical impact of permissionless blockchains, the complexity of the underlying systems and the adversarial environment in which they operate, it is fundamental to properly study and understand the emergent…
Blockchain technology has set off a wave of decentralization in the world since its birth. The trust system constructed by blockchain technology based on cryptography algorithm and computing power provides a practical and powerful solution…
Rollups have become the de facto scalability solution for Ethereum, securing more than $55B in assets. They achieve scale by executing transactions on a Layer 2 ledger, while periodically posting data and finalizing state on the Layer 1,…
Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 was recently implemented to transform Ethereum's transaction fee market. EIP-1559 utilizes an algorithmic update rule with a constant learning rate to estimate a base fee. The base fee reflects…
Existing fair exchange protocols usually neglect consideration of cost when assessing their fairness. However, in an environment with non-negligible transaction cost, e.g., public blockchains, high or unexpected transaction cost might be an…
Cryptocurrency off-chain networks such as Lightning (e.g., Bitcoin) or Raiden (e.g., Ethereum) aim to increase the scalability of traditional on-chain transactions. To support nodes in learning about possible paths to route their…
The Lightning Network promises to alleviate Bitcoin's known scalability problems. The operation of such second layer approaches relies on the ability of participants to turn to the blockchain to claim funds at any time, which is assumed to…