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A blockchain faces two fundamental challenges. It must motivate users to maintain the system while preventing a minority of these users from colluding and gaining disproportionate control. Many popular public blockchains use monetary…
We introduce the paradigm of validated decentralized learning for undirected networks with heterogeneous data and possible adversarial infiltration. We require (a) convergence to a global empirical loss minimizer when adversaries are…
We study Nash-dynamics in the context of blockchain protocols. We introduce a formal model, within which one can assess whether the Nash dynamics can lead utility-maximizing participants to defect from the "honest" protocol operation,…
The security of Bitcoin protocols is deeply dependent on the incentives provided to miners, which come from a combination of block rewards and transaction fees. As Bitcoin experiences more halving events, the protocol reward converges to…
The difficulty in specifying rewards for many real-world problems has led to an increased focus on learning rewards from human feedback, such as demonstrations. However, there are often many different reward functions that explain the human…
Decentralized data-feed systems enable blockchain-based smart contracts to access off-chain information by aggregating values from multiple oracles. To improve accuracy, these systems typically use an aggregation function, such as majority…
Existing Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) protocols face significant challenges in the consortium blockchain scenario. On the one hand, we can make little assumptions about the reliability and security of the underlying Internet. On the…
BitTorrent is a widely-deployed, peer-to-peer file transfer protocol engineered with a "tit for tat" mechanism that encourages cooperation. Unfortunately, there is little incentive for nodes to altruistically provide service to their peers…
Most popular blockchain solutions, like Bitcoin, rely on proof-of-work, guaranteeing that the output of the consensus is agreed upon with high probability. However, this probability depends on the delivery of messages and that the…
We present SmartShards: a new sharding algorithm for improving Byzantine tolerance and churn resistance in blockchains. Our algorithm places a peer in multiple shards to create an overlap. This simplifies cross-shard communication and shard…
In the past decade, blockchain has emerged as a promising solution for building secure distributed ledgers and has attracted significant attention. However, current blockchain systems suffer from limited throughput, poor scalability, and…
Blockchain systems often rely on rationality assumptions for their security, expecting that nodes are motivated to maximize their profits. These systems thus design their protocols to incentivize nodes to execute the honest protocol but…
We present Blizzard, a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) distributed ledger protocol that is aimed at making mobile devices first-class citizens in the consensus process. Blizzard introduces a novel two-tier architecture by having the mobile…
Federated learning has exhibited vulnerabilities to Byzantine attacks, where the Byzantine attackers can send arbitrary gradients to a central server to destroy the convergence and performance of the global model. A wealth of robust…
In the light of the recent fame of Blockchain technologies, numerous proposals and projects aiming at better practical viability have emerged. However, formally assessing their particularities and benefits has proven to be a difficult task.…
Current resource allocation paradigms, particularly in academic evaluation, are constrained by inherent limitations such as the Matthew Effect, reward hacking driven by Goodhart's Law, and the trade-off between efficiency and fairness. To…
A central challenge in blockchain tokenomics is aligning short-term performance incentives with long-term decentralization goals. We propose a framework for algorithmic monetary policies that navigates this tradeoff in repeated…
Despite the popularity and practical applicability of blockchains, there is very limited work on the theoretical foundation of blockchains: The lack of rigorous theory and analysis behind the curtain of blockchains has severely staggered…
We study the strategic implications that arise from adding one extra option to the miners participating in the bitcoin protocol. We propose that when adding a block, miners also have the ability to pay forward an amount to be collected by…
The idea of security sharing goes back to Nakamoto's introduction of merge mining, a technique that enables Bitcoin miners to reuse their hash power to bootstrap and secure other Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains. However, with the rise of…