Related papers: Permissionless Refereed Tournaments
Permissionless consensus protocols require a scarce resource to regulate leader election and provide Sybil resistance. Existing paradigms such as Proof of Work and Proof of Stake instantiate this scarcity through parallelizable resources…
Relay Mining presents a scalable solution employing probabilistic mechanisms, crypto-economic incentives, and new cryptographic primitives to estimate and prove the volume of Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) made from a client to a server.…
Banks routinely use neural networks to make decisions. While these models offer higher accuracy, they are susceptible to adversarial attacks, a risk often overlooked in the context of event sequences, particularly sequences of financial…
Lazy blockchains decouple consensus from transaction verification and execution to increase throughput. Although they can contain invalid transactions (e.g., double spends) as a result, these can easily be filtered out by full nodes that…
Most concurrent blockchain systems rely heavily on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) or Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanisms for decentralized consensus and security assurance. However, the substantial energy expenditure stemming from computationally…
Offloading of computation, e.g., to the cloud, is today a major task in distributed systems. Usually, consumers which apply offloading have to trust that a particular functionality offered by a service provider is delivering correct…
This paper presents a comprehensive refutation of the so-called "blockchain trilemma," a widely cited but formally ungrounded claim asserting an inherent trade-off between decentralisation, security, and scalability in blockchain protocols.…
Blockchains rely on a consensus among participants to achieve decentralization and security. However, reaching consensus in an online, digital world where identities are not tied to physical users is a challenging problem. Proof-of-work…
Throughput limitations of existing blockchain architectures are one of the most significant hurdles for their wide-spread adoption. Attempts to address this challenge include layer-2 solutions, such as Bitcoin's Lightning or Ethereum's…
Traditional public distributed ledgers have not been able to scale-out well and work efficiently. Sharding is deemed as a promising way to solve this problem. By partitioning all nodes into small committees and letting them work in…
Blockchain like Bitcoin and Ethereum suffer from scalability issues. Sharding is one of the most promising and leading solutions to scale blockchain. The basic idea behind sharding is to divide the blockchain network into multiple…
In today's programmable blockchains, smart contracts are limited to being deterministic and non-probabilistic. This lack of randomness is a consequential limitation, given that a wide variety of real-world financial contracts, such as…
Blockchain networks are facing increasingly heterogeneous computational demands, and in response, protocol designers have started building specialized infrastructure to supply that demand. This paper introduces Resonance: a new kind of…
Sharding enhances blockchain scalability by partitioning nodes into multiple groups for concurrent transaction processing. Configuring a large number of small shards usually helps improve transaction concurrency, but it also increases the…
Layer-two blockchain protocols emerged to address scalability issues related to fees, storage cost, and confirmation delay of on-chain transactions. They aggregate off-chain transactions into a fewer on-chain ones, thus offering immediate…
The majority of fault-tolerant distributed algorithms are designed assuming a nominal corruption model, in which at most a fraction $f_n$ of parties can be corrupted by the adversary. However, due to the infamous Sybil attack, nominal…
Consensus is unnecessary when the truth is available. In this paper, we present a new perspective of rebuilding the blockchain without consensus. When the consensus phase is eliminated from a blockchain, transactions could be canonized…
In this paper, we construct a decentralized clearing mechanism which endogenously and automatically provides a claims resolution procedure. This mechanism can be used to clear a network of obligations through blockchain. In particular, we…
Payment channel is a protocol which allows cryptocurrency users to route multiple transactions through network without committing them to the main blockchain network (mainnet). This ability makes them the most prominent solution to…
Blockchain technology emerged with the advent of Bitcoin and rapidly developed over the past few decades, becoming widely accepted and known by the public. However, in the past decades, the massive adoption of blockchain technology has yet…