Related papers: Light Clients for Lazy Blockchains
The Bitcoin Lightning Network is a layer 2 protocol designed to facilitate fast and inexpensive Bitcoin transactions. It operates by establishing channels between users, where Bitcoin is locked and transactions are conducted off-chain until…
Blockchain protocols are inherently limited in transaction throughput and latency. Recent efforts to address performance and scale blockchains have focused on off-chain payment channels. While such channels can achieve low latency and high…
Many of the problems that arise in the context of blockchains and decentralized finance can be seen as variations on classical problems of distributed computing. The smart contract model proposed here is intended to capture both the…
A smart contract is a digital program of transaction protocol (rules of contract) based on the consensus architecture of blockchain. Smart contracts with Blockchain are modern technologies that have gained enormous attention in scientific…
Permissionless blockchains offer many advantages but also have significant limitations including high latency. This prevents their use in important scenarios such as retail payments, where merchants should approve payments fast. Prior works…
For permissionless blockchains, scalability is paramount. While current technologies still fail to address this problem fully, many research works propose sharding or other techniques that extensively adopt parallel processing of…
This thesis proposes techniques aiming to make blockchain technologies and smart contract platforms practical by improving their scalability, latency, and privacy. This thesis starts by presenting the design and implementation of…
Although blockchain, the supporting technology of Bitcoin and various cryptocurrencies, has offered a potentially effective framework for numerous applications, it still suffers from the adverse affects of the impossibility triangle.…
Permissioned ledger technologies have gained significant traction over the last few years. For practical reasons, their applications have focused on transforming narrowly scoped use-cases in isolation. This has led to a proliferation of…
In the paper, we present designs for multiple blockchain consensus primitives and a novel blockchain system, all based on the use of trusted execution environments (TEEs), such as Intel SGX-enabled CPUs. First, we show how using TEEs for…
A blockchain is a distributed ledger for recording transactions, maintained by many nodes without central authority through a distributed cryptographic protocol. All nodes validate the information to be appended to the blockchain, and a…
The XRP Ledger Consensus Protocol is a previously developed consensus protocol powering the XRP Ledger. It is a low-latency Byzantine agreement protocol, capable of reaching consensus without full agreement on which nodes are members of the…
In this paper, we present a pricing mechanism that aligns incentives of agents who exchange resources on a decentralized ledger with the goal of maximizing transaction throughput. Subdividing a blockchain ledger into shards promises to…
Blockchain technology has emerged as a revolutionary tool in ensuring data integrity and security in digital transactions. However, the current approaches to data verification in blockchain systems, particularly in Ethereum, face challenges…
Blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum execute payment transactions securely, but their performance is limited by the need for global consensus. Payment networks overcome this limitation through off-chain transactions. Instead of writing…
Transaction throughput, confirmation latency and confirmation reliability are fundamental performance measures of any blockchain system in addition to its security. In a decentralized setting, these measures are limited by two underlying…
The Bitcoin network has offered a new way of securely performing financial transactions over the insecure network. Nevertheless, this ability comes with the cost of storing a large (distributed) ledger, which has become unsuitable for…
The Lightning Network is a peer-to-peer network designed to address Bitcoin's scalability challenges, facilitating rapid, cost-effective, and instantaneous transactions through bidirectional, blockchain-backed payment channels among network…
Blockchain is a novel technology that is rising a lot of interest in the industrial and re- search sectors because its properties of decentralisation, immutability and data integrity. Initially, the underlying consensus mechanism has been…
Decentralized crypto-currencies based on the blockchain architecture under-utilize available network bandwidth, making them unable to scale to thousands of transactions per second. We define the Blockclique architecture, that addresses this…