Related papers: Bribes to Miners: Evidence from Ethereum
Blockchain technology has evolved through many changes and modifications, such as smart-contracts since its inception in 2008. The popularity of a blockchain system is due to the fact that it offers a significant security advantage over…
Pyramid schemes are investment scams in which top-level participants in a hierarchical network recruit and profit from an expanding base of defrauded newer participants. Pyramid schemes have existed for over a century, but there have been…
As an emerging service framework built by combining cryptography, P2P network, consensus mechanism and innovative contract technology, blockchain has been widely used in digital finance, data sharing, message traceability and electronic…
Money laundering is a global phenomenon with wide-reaching social and economic consequences. Cryptocurrencies are particularly susceptible due to the lack of control by authorities and their anonymity. Thus, it is important to develop new…
Ethereum has adopted a rollup-centric roadmap to scale by making rollups (layer 2 scaling solutions) the primary method for handling transactions. The first significant step towards this goal was EIP-4844, which introduced blob transactions…
We performed the first systematic study of a new attack on Ethereum that steals cryptocurrencies. The attack is due to the unprotected JSON-RPC endpoints existed in Ethereum nodes that could be exploited by attackers to transfer the Ether…
The financial crime landscape is evolving along with the digitization in financial services. In this context, laws and regulations cannot efficiently cope with a fast-moving industry such as finance, which translates in late adoption of…
Blockchain technology, which has been known by mostly small technological circles up until recently, is bursting throughout the globe, with a potential economic and social impact that could fundamentally alter traditional financial and…
This thesis presents techniques to investigate transactions in uncharted cryptocurrencies and services. Cryptocurrencies are used to securely send payments online. Payments via the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, use pseudonymous addresses…
Public blockchains like Ethereum use Merkle trees to verify transactions received from untrusted servers before applying them to the blockchain. We empirically show that the low throughput of such blockchains is due to the I/O bottleneck…
Two MEV builders now produce nearly 80\% of Ethereum blocks. Block builders have the ability to reorder transactions on the blockchain in a way that can be harmful to participants. We estimate they would pay in the aggregate nearly \$14…
Digital currencies and cryptocurrencies have hesitantly started to penetrate the investors, and the next step will be the regulatory risk management framework. We examine the Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall properties for the major…
Mining in proof-of-work blockchains has become an expensive affair requiring specialized hardware capable of executing several megahashes per second at huge electricity costs. Miners earn a reward each time they mine a block within the…
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…
Blockchain-based Distributed Ledgers (DLs) promise to transform the existing financial system by making it truly democratic. In the past decade, blockchain technology has seen many novel applications ranging from the banking industry to…
Cryptocurrency miners have great latitude in deciding which transactions they accept, including their own, and the order in which they accept them. Ethereum miners in particular use this flexibility to collect MEV-Miner Extractable Value-by…
The registration, transfer, clearing and settlement of equities represents a significant part of economic activity currently underserved by modern technological innovation. In addition, recent events have revealed problems of transparency,…
With Ethereum's transition from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake in September 2022 came another paradigm shift, the Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) scheme. PBS was introduced to decouple the roles of selecting and ordering transactions in…
Ethereum clients execute transactions in a sequential order prescribed by the consensus protocol. This is a safe and conservative approach to blockchain transaction processing which forgoes running transactions in parallel even when doing…
Blockchains have seen growing traction with cryptocurrencies reaching a market cap of over 1 trillion dollars, major institution investors taking interests, and global impacts on governments, businesses, and individuals. Also growing…