Related papers: SoK: MEV Countermeasures: Theory and Practice
Monero is a popular crypto-currency which focuses on privacy. The blockchain uses cryptographic techniques to obscure transaction values as well as a `ring confidential transaction' which seeks to hide a real transaction among a variable…
Emerging blockchain and cryptocurrency-based technologies are redefining the way we conduct business in cyberspace. Today, a myriad of blockchain and cryptocurrency systems, applications, and technologies are widely available to companies,…
Blockchains are widely used for secure transaction processing, but their scalability remains limited, and existing multichain designs are typically static even as demand and capacity shift. We cast blockchain configuration as a multiagent…
Modern cryptocurrency systems, such as Ethereum, permit complex financial transactions through scripts called smart contracts. These smart contracts are executed many, many times, always without real concurrency. First, all smart contracts…
Layer 2 rollups are rapidly absorbing DeFi activity, securing over $40 billion and accounting for nearly half of Ethereum's DEX volume by Q1 2025, yet their MEV dynamics remain understudied. We address this gap by defining and quantifying…
A smart contract on a blockchain cannot keep a secret because its data is replicated on all nodes in a network. To remedy this problem, it has been suggested to combine blockchains with trusted execution environments (TEEs), such as Intel…
The Ethereum blockchain network is a decentralized platform enabling smart contract execution and transactions of Ether (ETH) [1], its designated cryptocurrency. Ethereum is the second most popular cryptocurrency with a market cap of more…
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…
Proof-of-Work blockchain, despite its numerous benefits, is still not an entirely secure technology due to the existence of Selfish Mining (SM) strategies that can disrupt the system and its mining economy. While the effect of SM has been…
Blockchain introduces decentralized trust in peer-to-peer networks, advancing security and democratizing systems. Yet, a unified definition for decentralization remains elusive. Our Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) seeks to bridge this…
Modern blockchains increasingly rely on parallel execution to improve throughput. We show several industry and academic transaction fee mechanisms (TFMs) struggle to simultaneously account for execution parallelism while remaining…
Cryptocurrencies typically aim at preserving the privacy of their users. Different cryptocurrencies preserve privacy at various levels, some of them requiring users to rely on strategies to raise the privacy level to their needs. Among…
We consider front-running to be a course of action where an entity benefits from prior access to privileged market information about upcoming transactions and trades. Front-running has been an issue in financial instrument markets since the…
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…
Smart contracts on public blockchains now manage large amounts of value, and vulnerabilities in these systems can lead to substantial losses. As AI agents become more capable at reading, writing, and running code, it is natural to ask how…
Most public blockchain protocols, including the popular Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, do not formally specify the order in which miners should select transactions from the pool of pending (or uncommitted) transactions for inclusion in…
Blockchain's decentralization, transparency, and tamper-resistance properties have facilitated the system's use in various application fields. However, the low throughput and high confirmation latency hinder the widespread adoption of…
Blockchain, an emerging decentralized security system, has been applied in many applications, such as bitcoin, smart grid, and Internet-of-Things. However, running the mining process may cost too much energy consumption and computing…
It is interesting but difficult and challenging to study Ethereum with multiple mining pools. One of the main difficulties comes from not only how to represent such a general tree with multiple block branches (or sub-chains) related to the…
Transaction fees represent a major incentive in many blockchain systems as a way to incentivize processing transactions. Unfortunately, they also introduce an enormous amount of incentive asymmetry compared to alternatives like fixed block…