Related papers: Defending against the nothing-at-stake problem in …
Fault-tolerant distributed systems move the trust in a single party to a majority of parties participating in the protocol. This makes blockchain based crypto-currencies possible: they allow parties to agree on a total order of transactions…
Storage scalability is paramount in the era of big data blockchain. A storage-scalable blockchain can effectively scale out state storage to an arbitrary number of nodes and reduce the storage pressure on each, similar to distributed…
Blockchain sharding is a promising approach to solving the dilemma between decentralisation and high performance (transaction throughput) for blockchain. The main challenge of Blockchain sharding systems is how to reach a decision on a…
We propose a proof-of-work algorithm that rewards blockchain miners for using computational resources to solve NP-complete puzzles. The resulting blockchain will publicly store and improve solutions to problems with real world applications…
This paper reviews and highlights how coding schemes have been used to solve various problems in blockchain systems. Specifically, these problems relate to scaling blockchains in terms of their data storage, computation and communication…
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…
Committee-based blockchains are among the most popular alternatives of proof-of-work based blockchains, such as Bitcoin. They provide strong consistency (no fork) under classical assumptions, and avoid using energy-consuming mechanisms to…
Bitcoin is the most secure blockchain in the world, supported by the immense hash power of its Proof-of-Work miners. Proof-of-Stake chains are energy-efficient, have fast finality but face several security issues: susceptibility to…
In this paper, we review the undercutting attacks in the transaction-fee-based regime of proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains with the longest chain fork-choice rule. Next, we focus on the problem of fluctuations in mining revenue and the mining…
The main problem faced by smart contract platforms is the amount of time and computational power required to reach consensus. In a classical blockchain model, each operation is in fact performed by each node, both to update the status and…
Although blockchain, the supporting technology of Bitcoin and various cryptocurrencies, has offered a potentially effective framework for numerous applications, it still suffers from the adverse affects of the impossibility triangle.…
We define and examine the shutdown problem for blockchain systems: how to gracefully end the system's operation at the end of its useful life. A particular focus is those blockchain systems that hold archival data of long-lived interest. We…
Blockchain Sharding is a blockchain performance enhancement approach. By splitting a blockchain into several parallel-run committees (shards), it helps increase transaction throughput, reduce computational resources required, and increase…
Selfish mining is a well known vulnerability in blockchains exploited by miners to steal block rewards. In this paper, we explore a new form of selfish mining attack that guarantees high rewards with low cost. We show the feasibility of…
The core premise of permissionless blockchains is their reliable and secure operation without the need to trust any individual agent. At the heart of blockchain consensus mechanisms is an explicit cost (whether work or stake) for…
A promising way to overcome the scalability limitations of the current blockchain is to use sharding, which is to split the transaction processing among multiple, smaller groups of nodes. A well-performed blockchain sharding system requires…
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…
Sharding is used to improve the scalability and performance of blockchain systems. We investigate the stability of blockchain sharding, where transactions are continuously generated by an adversarial model. The system consists of $n$…
Blockchain protocols come with a variety of security guarantees. For example, BFT-inspired protocols such as Algorand tend to be secure in the partially synchronous setting, while longest chain protocols like Bitcoin will normally require…
Bitcoin, as well as many of its successors, require the whole transaction record to be reliably acquired by all nodes to prevent double-spending. Recently, many blockchains have been proposed to achieve scale-out throughput by letting nodes…