Related papers: An Event Study of the Ethereum Transition to Proof…
Blockchain technology has become a trusted method for establishing secure and transparent transactions through a distributed, encrypted network. The operation of blockchain is governed by consensus algorithms, among which Proof of Stake…
In proof-of-work based blockchains such as Ethereum, verification of blocks is an integral part of establishing consensus across nodes. However, in Ethereum, miners do not receive a reward for verifying. This implies that miners face the…
Following the birth of Bitcoin and the introduction of the Ethereum ERC20 protocol a decade ago, recent years have witnessed a growing number of cryptographic tokens that are being introduced by researchers, private sector companies and…
Do Ethereum's Layer-2 (L2) rollups actually decongest the Layer-1 (L1) mainnet once protocol upgrades and demand are held constant? Using a 1245-day daily panel from August 5, 2021 to December 31, 2024 that spans the London, Merge, and…
Blockchain has become a popular decentralized paradigm for various applications in the zero-trust environment. The core of the blockchain is the consensus protocol, which establishes consensus among all the participants. PoW (Proof-of-Work)…
To address the large amount of energy wasted by blockchains, we propose a decentralized consensus protocol for blockchains in which the computation can be used to search for good approximate solutions to any optimization problem. Our…
The gas fee, paid for inclusion in the blockchain, is analyzed in two parts. First, we consider how effort in terms of resources required to process and store a transaction turns into a gas limit, which, through a fee, comprised of the base…
Trustless systems, such as those blockchain enpowered, provide trust in the system regardless of the trust of its participants, who may be honest or malicious. Proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols and DAG-based approaches have emerged as a better…
Transaction fee markets are essential components of blockchain economies, as they resolve the inherent scarcity in the number of transactions that can be added to each block. In early blockchain protocols, this scarcity was resolved through…
The Ethereum blockchain network enables transaction processing and smart-contract execution through levies of transaction fees, commonly known as gas fees. This framework mediates economic participation via a market-based mechanism for gas…
As smart contract platforms autonomously manage billions of dollars of capital, quantifying the portfolio risk that investors engender in these systems is increasingly important. Recent work illustrates that Proof of Stake (PoS) is…
The consensus protocol is a critical component of distributed ledgers and blockchains. Achieving consensus over a decentralized network poses challenges to transaction finality and performance. Currently, the highest-performing consensus…
The security of most existing cryptocurrencies is based on a concept called Proof-of-Work, in which users must solve a computationally hard cryptopuzzle to authorize transactions (`one unit of computation, one vote'). This leads to enormous…
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…
This paper examines the economic and security implications of Proof-of-Stake (POS) designs, providing a survey of POS design choices and their underlying economic principles in prominent POS-blockchains. The paper argues that…
Large proof of work (PoW) networks allow anyone to earn rewards by running computation-intensive hash puzzles for profit, yet they typically consume electricity comparable to that of medium-sized countries. Repurposing computing resources…
This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of historical data across two popular blockchain networks: Ethereum and Solana. Our study focuses on two key aspects: transaction conflicts and the maximum theoretical parallelism within…
Modern blockchains support a variety of distributed applications beyond cryptocurrencies, including smart contracts -- which let users execute arbitrary code in a distributed and decentralized fashion. Regardless of their intended…
The cost of using a blockchain infrastructure as well as the time required to search and retrieve information from it must be considered when designing a decentralized application. In this work, we examine a comprehensive set of data…
We study how the 2024 U.S. presidential election, viewed as a major political risk event, affected cryptocurrency markets by distinguishing human-driven peer-to-peer stablecoin transactions from automated algorithmic activity. Using…