Related papers: Light Clients for Lazy Blockchains
We consider the problem of cross-chain payment whereby customers of different escrows---implemented by a bank or a blockchain smart contract---successfully transfer digital assets without trusting each other. Prior to this work, cross-chain…
Smart contracts are widely utilized in cross-chain interactions, where their results are transmitted from one blockchain (the producer blockchain) to another (the consumer blockchain). Unfortunately, the consumer blockchain often accepts…
Peer-to-peer trading and the move to decentralized grids have reshaped the energy markets in the United States. Notwithstanding, such developments lead to new challenges, mainly regarding the safety and authenticity of energy trade. This…
The security of blockchain systems is fundamentally based on the decentralized consensus in which the majority of parties behave honestly, and the content verification process is essential to maintaining the robustness of blockchain…
Sharding is a promising blockchain scaling solution. But it currently suffers from high latency and low throughput when it comes to cross-shard transactions, i.e., transactions that require coordination from multiple shards. The root cause…
Bitcoin provides freshness properties by forming a blockchain where each block is associated with its timestamp and the previous block. Due to these properties, the Bitcoin protocol is being used as a decentralized, trusted, and secure…
Smart contract transactions demonstrate issues of performance and correctness that application programmers must work around. Although the blockchain consensus mechanism approaches ACID compliance, use cases that rely on frequent state…
To improve transaction rates, many cryptocurrencies have implemented so-called ''Layer-2'' transaction protocols, where payments are routed across networks of private payment channels. However, for a given transaction, not every network…
Bitcoin is the first successful decentralized global digital cash system. Its mining process requires intense computational resources, therefore its usefulness remains a disputable topic. We aim to solve three problems with Bitcoin and…
Blockchains are maintained by a network of participants that run algorithms designed to maintain collectively a distributed machine tolerant to Byzantine attacks. From the point of view of users, blockchains provide the illusion of…
This paper proposes an efficient framework to execute Smart Contract Transactions (SCTs) concurrently based on object semantics, using optimistic Single-Version Object-based Software Transactional Memory Systems (SVOSTMs) and Multi-Version…
Since the inception of Bitcoin, the distributed systems community has shown interest in the design of efficient blockchain systems. However, initial blockchain applications (like Bitcoin) attain very low throughput, which has promoted the…
Blockchain is an essentially distributed database recording all transactions or digital events among participating parties. Each transaction in the records is approved and verified by consensus of the participants in the system that…
Research on blockchains addresses multiple issues, with one being writing smart contracts. In our previous research we described methodology and a tool to generate, in automated fashion, smart contracts from BPMN models. The generated smart…
Smart contracting protocols promise to regulate the transfer of cryptocurrency amongst participants in a trustless manner. A safe smart contract implementation should ensure that each participant can always append a contract transaction to…
Trading on decentralized exchanges has been one of the primary use cases for permissionless blockchains with daily trading volume exceeding billions of U.S.~dollars. In the status quo, users broadcast transactions and miners are responsible…
As an append-only distributed database, blockchain is utilized in a vast variety of applications including the cryptocurrency and Internet-of-Things (IoT). The existing blockchain solutions show downsides in communication and storage…
Transactions submitted through the blockchain peer-to-peer (P2P) network may leak out exploitable information. We study the economic incentives behind the adoption of blockchain dark venues, where users' transactions are observable only by…
A hard-fork reconfiguration of the peer to peer Bitcoin network is described that substitutes tamper-evident logs and proof-of-stake consensus for proof-of-work consensus. The block creation rewards and transaction fees are reallocated to…
The Lightning Network (LN) has enjoyed rapid growth over recent years, and has become the most popular scaling solution for the Bitcoin blockchain. The security of the LN relies on the ability of the nodes to close a channel by settling…