Related papers: Bayesian Mechanism Design for Blockchain Transacti…
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…
Blockchain protocols often seek to procure computationally challenging work from a decentralized set of participants. While there are simple procurement auctions that result in the minimal cost of acquisition and maximal efficiency, they…
Blockchains rely on economic incentives to ensure secure and decentralised operation, making incentive compatibility a core design concern. However, protocols are rarely deployed in isolation. Applications interact with the underlying…
The present dissertation addresses the problem of fairly distributing shared resources in non-commercial blockchain networks. Blockchains are distributed systems that order and timestamp records of a given network of users, in a public,…
In Proof-of-Work blockchains, difficulty algorithms serve the crucial purpose of maintaining a stable transaction throughput by dynamically adjusting the block difficulty in response to the miners' constantly changing computational power.…
In an age where sustainability is of paramount importance, the significance of both high-performance computing and intelligent algorithms cannot be understated. Yet, these domains often demand hefty computational power, translating to…
Bitcoin mining presents a significant economic incentive for efficient hashing and broadcast of data, both parameters stemming from the Proofs of Work used to advance the network. This incentive has led to the development of Bitcoin…
Blockchains face inherent limitations when communicating outside their own ecosystem, largely due to the Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) 3f+1 security model. Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are a promising mitigation because they allow…
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…
Given the parallels between game theory and consensus, it makes sense to intelligently design blockchain or DAG protocols with an incentive-compatible-first mentality. To that end, we propose a new blockchain or DAG protocol enhancement…
Payment networks were introduced to address the limitation on the transaction throughput of popular blockchains. To open a payment channel one has to publish a transaction on-chain and pay the appropriate transaction fee. A transaction can…
EIP-1559 is a proposal to make several tightly coupled additions to Ethereum's transaction fee mechanism, including variable-size blocks and a burned base fee that rises and falls with demand. This report assesses the game-theoretic…
Participation in permissionless blockchains results in competition over system resources, which needs to be controlled with fees. Ethereum's current fee mechanism is implemented via a first-price auction that results in unpredictable fees…
Tendermint-core blockchains (e.g. Cosmos) are considered today one of the most viable alternatives for the highly energy consuming proof-of-work blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Their particularity is that they aim at offering…
An emerging blockchain protocol design pattern leverages the asymmetry between the computational effort in performing versus verifying tasks. For example, cryptographic validity proofs (e.g., SNARKS) require the prover to expend significant…
Despite the popularity and practical applicability of blockchains, there is very limited work on the theoretical foundation of blockchains: The lack of rigorous theory and analysis behind the curtain of blockchains has severely staggered…
Threshold cryptography is essential for many blockchain protocols. For example, many protocols rely on threshold common coin to implement asynchronous consensus, leader elections, and provide support for randomized applications. Similarly,…
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…
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…
Public blockchains, though renowned for their transparency and immutability, suffer from significant privacy concerns. Network-level analysis and long-term observation of publicly available transactions can often be used to infer user…