Related papers: SoK: MEV Countermeasures: Theory and Practice
We study the problem of providing blockchain applications with \emph{economically viable randomness} (EVR), namely, randomness that has significant economic consequences. Applications of EVR include blockchain-based lotteries and gambling.…
Bitcoin and Ethereum are the top two blockchain-based cryptocurrencies whether from cryptocurrency market cap or popularity. However, they are vulnerable to selfish mining and stubborn mining due to that both of them adopt Proof-of-Work…
All public blockchains are secured by a proof of opportunity cost among block producers. For example, the security offered by proof-of-work (PoW) systems, like Bitcoin, is due to spent computation; it is work precisely because it cannot be…
Permissionless blockchains promise to be resilient against censorship by a single entity. This suggests that deterministic rules, and not third-party actors, are responsible for deciding if a transaction is appended to the blockchain or…
Bitcoin and Ethereum, whose miners arguably collectively comprise the most powerful computational resource in the history of mankind, offer no more power for processing and verifying transactions than a typical smart phone. The system…
Financial fraud cases are on the rise even with the current technological advancements. Due to the lack of inter-organization synergy and because of privacy concerns, authentic financial transaction data is rarely available. On the other…
We investigate the market microstructure of Automated Market Makers (AMMs), the most prominent type of blockchain-based decentralized exchanges. We show that the order execution mechanism yields token value loss for liquidity providers if…
Sealed-bid auctions ensure fair competition and efficient allocation but are often deployed on centralized infrastructure, enabling opaque manipulation. Public blockchains eliminate central control, yet their inherent transparency conflicts…
A blockchain, such as Bitcoin, is an append-only, secure, transparent, distributed ledger. A fair blockchain is expected to have healthy metrics; high honest mining power, low processing latency, i.e., low wait times for transactions and…
The advent of decentralized trading markets introduces a number of new challenges for consensus protocols. In addition to the `usual' attacks -- a subset of the validators trying to prevent disagreement -- there is now the possibility of…
We study the economics of transaction reverts on Ethereum rollups and show that they are not accidental failures but equilibrium outcomes of MEV strategies. Using execution traces from major L2s, we find that over 80% of reverted…
This paper revisits the ubiquitous problem of achieving state machine replication in blockchains based on repeated consensus, like Tendermint. To achieve state machine replication in blockchains built on top of consensus, one needs to…
Blockchain systems, such as Ethereum, use an approach called "metering" to assign a cost to smart contract execution, an approach which is designed to incentivise miners to operate the network and protect it against DoS attacks. In the…
Increasing popularity of trading digital assets can lead to significant delays in Blockchain networks when processing transactions. When transaction fees become miners' primary revenue, an imbalance in reward may lead to miners adopting…
The Ethereum blockchain utilizes the EIP-1559 algorithm to manage transaction inclusion and block assembly. However, EIP-1559 and much of the existing literature study this problem from a static perspective, focusing on price evolution…
As an emerging technology, blockchain has achieved great success in numerous application scenarios, from intelligent healthcare to smart cities. However, a long-standing bottleneck hindering its further development is the massive resource…
Throughput limitations of existing blockchain architectures are well documented and are one of the most significant hurdles for their wide-spread adoption. In our previous proof-of-concept work, we have shown that separating computation…
A proof of work (PoW) blockchain protocol distributes rewards to its participants, called miners, according to their share of the total computational power. Sufficiently large miners can perform selfish mining - deviate from the protocol to…
We identify a subtle security issue that impacts the design of smart contracts, because agents may themselves deploy smart contracts (side contracts). Typically, equilibria of games are analyzed in vitro, under the assumption that players…
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…